- I am a tea taster and blender
and I spend a lot of my
time trying to produce
the perfect blend.
But why do I bother?
Why do we blend teas at all?
Why not just leave them
as nature intended them,
as the skill of the factory
manager intended them?
The answer is that sometimes
we want to appreciate the tea
as a variable product that, like wine,
varies with the land it was produced on
with the weather that
has been experienced,
with the quality of the pluck, et cetera.
But more often than not, we
want our tea to taste the same.
When you go into the supermarket
and buy your favourite blend
you want it always to taste the same.
If you run a cafe and you
become known for your tea
you want it always to taste the same.
Sometimes, the tea I buy is fantastic.
Sometimes, it's not possible
to buy the same quality
and we need to try and average
out those inconsistencies
and produce a single named blend
that people can always enjoy.
That's not to say that we shouldn't also
sell teas on their own as what they are.
I, for example, often sell
tea from the Holyrood Estate
in Sri Lanka which is a favourite of mine.
And we do that, too,
but generally speaking,
we want to blend teas to
smooth out the variations
and produce one standard
blend that people,
be that consumers or cafes or whatever,
can rely upon for doing the
job that it's supposed to do.
Portsmouth tea, for
example, Hampshire tea,
you know, my two main blends,
people know what they taste like
and they want them to
always taste the same.
Now, that's easier said than done
and it involves tasting
hundreds of different teas,
buying some of them and
then tasting them again
and blending them in varying proportions
always to produce the same result.
It's like the number game
on the Countdown show
with Carol Vorderman.
You know the number that
you want to end up with,
but what goes into it changes
and you have to try and
combine those numbers correctly
to produce the right result.
The real challenge is
that we don't always know
the result either when we're
developing a new blend.
We don't always know what
we want to end up with
so we end up with two unknowns
and it's a very interesting
game and that's what I spend
quite a large part of my time doing.
