Ingredients · Tea
Sumatra 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
- takes milk
How to use it
Boiling water, 3 to 5 minutes, with or without milk. It is a blending tea — it gives body and briskness to a breakfast blend rather than standing alone.
With food
Milk and sugar. Toast and breakfast. Shortbread. Smoked fish. Aged cheese.
With spices
Cardamom, ginger and cinnamon. Cloves. Black pepper.
With tea
Blended with Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan tea in breakfast blends.
Its story
Where it comes from
Tea plants were brought to what is now Indonesia in the colonial period — a German botanist carried seeds from Japan to Batavia in 1684, and experimental plantings of Japanese seed succeeded at the Bogor Botanical Gardens in the 1820s. Plantations were established first in Java and spread to North Sumatra in the early twentieth century; around two-thirds of national production comes from West Java, with Central Java and North Sumatra making up half the rest. Our lot names no estate.
What happened
Indonesian tea is a colonial plantation crop and its scale was set by force. Tea was made part of the Cultivation System — the cultuurstelsel — by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in 1828, a policy enforced in Java and elsewhere between 1830 and 1870 that required a portion of agricultural land to be given over to export crops for the Dutch. By the early twentieth century the Dutch East Indies was the third largest source of tea exports after British India and Ceylon, exporting more tea than China, and tea was the colony's second-most valuable export behind rubber. That is the industry a Sumatra black tea comes out of.
On the shelf with it
Every product it goes into.
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Scottish Breakfast
Regular price From $8.00 CADRegular price
