The Kent & Sussex Tea and Coffee Company – Earl Grey
The Kent & Sussex Tea and Coffee Company – Pure Kenya
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I tell myself, on an increasingly regular basis, that I really don’t need to buy any more tea at the moment. I have quite a stash of tea right now – probably enough to keep me in reviews until 2121*.
I then promptly ignore myself and buy more tea. Only yesterday I was soliciting people to send me tea bags in the post. Also, I’m on holiday, and surely that’s an excuse to buy tea, if ever there was one. I’ve already discovered a charming delicatessen in Rye which tempted me with their tea selection and then I went to pick up some bread and such like at the local supermarket and accidentally came back with 100 tea bags.
Because, you see, they were from a local teamonger. How can one resist the urge to buy tea from the Kent & Sussex Tea and Coffee Company, when one is literally holidaying on the Kent and Sussex borders? I’m only human, goddammit.
Before we go any further, let’s just get the actual tea review part of this post out of the way. These teas are horrible. They’re cheap and nasty and leave a sensation of tea dust residue in one’s mouth. This tea would be suitable only for combining with plenty of sugar and giving to someone in shock. They have no place in a tea lover’s cupboard.
This has led me to question the wisdom of buying packs of tea, purely because the teamonger is based in the local vicinity. I mean it’s not local tea is it? These teas unashamedly come from Kenya and China. It’s not like buying local cheese or local honey, where the product has actually been produced on your doorstep. And yet I had hitherto accepted the idea of regional tea blends without question. I was singing the praises yesterday of Dorset Tea, whose tea leaves are decidedly not grown in Dorset. (Although there is a tea plantation in Cornwall so the idea isn’t as crazy as it might be.)
I’m not dissing the skills of the tea blender here. (Well, I am a bit dissing the skills of Kent & Sussex Tea and Coffee Company’s tea blenders, because I think they’re not very good.) I appreciate that there is a great deal more to running a successful teamongery business than just importing leaves from tea-growing nations. There are a whole host of British teamongers out there, sourcing testing and blending their teas and making a jolly good job of it too.
But where does this notion of tea specific to geographical regions of the UK come from? We’re not short of teas with English counties in their name. I’ve already mentioned the Dorset Tea Company, there are a whole host of London branded teas, and of course, Yorkshire is home to quite the successful tea purveyor. Is it based on the requirements of the people who are based there? On the local water? Can one make sweeping generalisations about the characteristics of this country’s inhabitants based on their tea? If so, I shall conclude that Dorset folk like their tea sunshiney and Yorkshire dwellers want their tea ‘proper’. And as for the inhabitants of Kent and Sussex? Well, apparently, they like tea that’s a bit shit.
* I hadn’t really done the maths on this one. Four reviews a week for one hundred years would require 20,857 different types of tea. My tea cupboards aren’t quite that well-stocked.
Today’s featured books are The A-Z of Curious Sussex by Wendy Hughes and the Official Guide to Rye and District (1956 edition) – two books plucked from the shelves of the lovely holiday cottage that I’m staying in.
