Loose Leaf Black Tea

Before the East India Company sorted its teas into black and green, the tea that came out of the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian was simply bohea. Legend has it the first pine-smoked black tea was made there in 1646, by villagers drying their leaf fast over fire as Qing soldiers came through. Bohea was the colonies' most common tea, and in December 1773 the Sons of Liberty dumped 340 chests of it into Boston Harbor, 240 of them bohea.

What makes a black tea is the making. In Qimen the leaf is withered and oxidised slowly, and China calls the result red tea. In the Wuyi smoke house it dries over pine. At Amgoorie in Assam, around 1930, rollers with hundreds of teeth began crushing, tearing and curling leaf into pellets that brew fast and dark.

Britain's thirst for the leaf drained silver to China and was answered with opium; the First Opium War ended in 1842 with five treaty ports and Hong Kong ceded. Then the Empire grew its own: the native Assam plant was found already growing, Robert Fortune was sent to steal the know-how, and by 1888 Britain took more tea from India than from China. Congou from China was the base of the nineteenth-century English Breakfast; the Assams, Darjeelings and Ceylons that followed sit on the single-estate shelf.

This shelf is the breakfast pot and its descendants. English Breakfast, Organic and Irish Breakfast, Organic; Earl Grey, Organic, with its mandarin's-gift legend; the pine smoke of Lapsang Souchong, Organic; Russian Caravan, Organic, after the camel trains that carried tea across Mongolia to Kyakhta; and Tibetan Monk's Blend, for the bowl a host refills after every sip.