Ingredients · Tea
Kenyan Black Tea
Camellia sinensis var. assamica · Theaceae (tea family)
What it’s like, and how to use it
- 212°F / 100°C
- 3 to 5 minutes
- made for milk
How to use it
Boiling water, 3 to 5 minutes. Built for milk. Simmered with ginger and spice for chai ya tangawizi. It is the workhorse of a breakfast blend, and it takes a long steep better than most.
With food
Milk and sugar. Toast and fried breakfast. Mandazi and chapati. Malt loaf. Aged cheese.
With spices
Ginger above all, then cardamom, cloves and cinnamon — chai ya tangawizi.
With tea
Blended with Assam and Ceylon in breakfast teas, where it provides the briskness.
Its story
Where it comes from
Tea was introduced at Limuru in 1903. Our product is titled Kambaa Estate; the Kenya Tea Development Agency lists the Kambaa factory among its Kiambu County factories, and tea was first planted in the Kambaa area in 1965. Grade and elevation are unconfirmed.
What happened
Kenyan tea is a settler industry that African farmers were shut out of and now largely own, and that is the honest shape of the story. Tea was introduced at Limuru in 1903 and grown commercially from 1924 by the white settler minority; before 1954, cash crops, credit and marketing in colonial Kenya were restricted to them. The Tea Board of Kenya's own timeline records African farmers beginning to grow tea in 1956. The Special Crops Development Authority was created in 1960 to promote the growing of tea by Africans, and on 20 January 1964, after independence, it became the Kenya Tea Development Authority. Today the KTDA is owned by about 600,000 smallholder tea farmers and manages 69 factories, producing around 60 per cent of Kenya's output. The everyday East African cup is chai ya tangawizi — black tea simmered with fresh ginger, often cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, with milk and sugar.
On the shelf with it
Every product it goes into.
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Kambaa Estate
Regular price From $9.00 CADRegular price
