Two Spoons – Ceylon Tea
Two Spoons Ceylon is a truly tasty tea. The teamongers – a brace of professional tea tasters with over 50 years of experience – describe this tea as “light and delicate with a zesty citrus flavour” and, you know what, they’re not wrong.
I’m a big fan of Sri Lankan tea. I know it’s daft to make generalisations about tea, but I do consider there to be a strength scale of the main black teas. Kenyan tea being the strongest, then Assam, Ceylon and Darjeeling at the delicate end. Ceylon tea, as a rule, is the perfect point in the strong/delicate gradient for an everyday cuppa.
The surprising thing about this tea – given how lovely it is – is how small the leaves are. I am accustomed to thinking that large leaves good small leaves bad. (Here I go, making sweeping generalisations again.) The leaf pieces in this tea packet are tiny.
There are four grades of tea: whole leaf, broken leaf, fannings and dust. And I’m guessing this tea comes under ‘fannings’. It may actually be ‘dust’ for all I know. I broke open a PG Tips teabag, and looks-wise, the leaves are very similar. (I half-inch PG Tips from Premier Inns expressly for such comparison purposes.)
This just goes to show that size isn’t everything because PG Tips is disgusting, and Two Spoons’ Ceylon is delicious. This tea is from the Dimbula region of Sri Lanka, chosen – the teamongers tell us -after “numerous tastings and a lot of debate”. That must be a fun job.
The history of tea growing in Sri Lanka is – as these things usually are – a history of the British being dicks. The Portuguese and the Dutch both invaded Ceylon before the Brits got around to it. But if there’s one thing we British were good at, it was being imperialistic bastards.
By 1815 Ceylon was a British Crown colony which meant that the British could help themselves to the land and effectively enslave the native population. This was considered the right and proper way to engage with foreigners in the 19th century.
There’s a brilliant book called 52 Times Britain was a Bellend by James Felton. The only tea-related chapter in it is about the Opium Wars. (Because starting two wars because a tea-growing nation doesn’t like your drug dealing is a masterstroke of dickishness.) But really, the whole book could have been about the early European tea trade.
The best of that can be said about the British in Ceylon in the 19th century is that we didn’t behave quite as appallingly there as we did in Assam. So well done us.
Happily, the world has changed. I mean, the world is still terrible in lots of ways, but at least I’m not funding a monarch-sanctioned colonial dictatorship by drinking a cup of Two Spoons Ceylon tea.
Two Spoons are an ethical, environmentally-aware bunch. They produce excellent tea. And they put funny posts on Instagram. They seem like a nice pair of lads.
Today’s featured book is Tea: The Drink That Changed the World by John Griffiths.
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