Ingredients · Tea

Assam Black Tea

Camellia sinensis var. assamica · Theaceae (tea family)

Assam Black Tea
The maltiest black tea there is, and the reason your breakfast cup tastes the way it does. Assam grows on the floodplain of the Brahmaputra — lowland, at or near sea level, in monsoon rain of 250 to 300 mm a day and daytime heat around 36°C, which is nothing like the hill-country conditions most tea wants. That heat is what makes it strong. Twelve products here use it, and it is the base whenever a blend needs to stand up to milk, sugar or a fistful of spice.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partLeaf
KindTea
CaffeineContains caffeine
Where it is fromIndia
TasteMalt, biscuit and dark amber; brisk and full-bodied, honey in the tippy grades
How to brew it
  • 212°F / 100°C
  • 3 to 5 minutes
  • made for milk

How to use it

Boiling water, 3 to 5 minutes; it is built for milk. The CTC grade is the chai engine — boiled with milk, sugar and spice rather than steeped. Whole-leaf tippy grades are better drunk plain or with very little milk, where the honey shows.

With food

Milk and cream. Toast, malt loaf, shortbread. Fried breakfast. Smoked fish. Aged cheddar. Dark chocolate and caramel.

With spices

Cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper — masala chai is an Assam recipe before it is anything else. Star anise. Nutmeg.

With tea

Blended with Ceylon for brightness in a breakfast tea, or with Keemun for a Russian-style one.

Its story

Where it comes from

The Brahmaputra valley in Assam, northeast India. The large-leafed variety assamica was growing there wild before the British arrived looking for it. Grades matter more here than elsewhere: TGFOP is Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, a whole-leaf grade marked by golden tips, sweeter and fuller; BOP is Broken Orange Pekoe; CTC — crush, tear, curl — is the machine-made pellet that brews fast and dark and accounts for over 80% of tea made for the Indian domestic market.

What happened

The British tried to grow Chinese tea in Assam and failed, then discovered the Singpho people were already cultivating and drinking their own — plucking tender leaves, sun-drying them, leaving them out to the night dew for three days and nights, then smoking them in bamboo tubes. Robert Bruce met the plant in 1823; Maniram Dewan directed the Bruce brothers to the Singpho chief Bessa Gam, later became dewan of the Assam Tea Company, left to found his own garden at Cinnamara as the first Indian commercial tea planter in Assam, and was hanged at Jorhat in 1858 for his part in the uprising. The gardens themselves were built on indentured labour: 419,841 recruits, 138,071 of them children, entered Assam between 1877 and 1929, and 158,706 more between 1938 and 1947. Of 84,915 recruited in the three years from May 1863, 30,000 were dead by the middle of 1866; of one batch of 2,272 the Assam Company brought in, eleven per cent died on the journey. The Workmen's Breach of Contract Act of 1859 made flogging a penalty for breaking a contract, and flogging was common in the gardens. The community today numbers around seven million.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Ingredients Every plant, seed, bark and salt in the shop on one page — what it is, why it is in the blend, and where it comes from. See them all Collections Every shelf in the shop on one page — teas by leaf and flavour, spices by kind and cuisine. Open any shelf to see what is on it. Browse the shelves The Showroom The whole shop on one floor — every tea, spice and blend, filtered by what you are after, with the basket beside you. Open the Showroom Elsewhere Seventeen short trips — a place, a moment, a feeling — each with the teas and spices that get you there. Take a trip