Nice tea quotation from Orwell

That's a strange book. I bounces between sharp observation and blind prejudice.

Right. When he grew up, his politics improved but his tea aesthetic turned Colonel-Blimpish.

/Lew

Indeed, there was a funny stab at armenians, 'trust a snake before trusting a jew, trust a jew before you trust a greek, but never trust an armenian.'

Well, I think the only good tea available at the time was the type of english breakfast or irish breakfast blends, so he couldn't say much about other varieties, but his advice on these strong english teas was more or less spot on. He mentions that chinese teas are not very good, but I think he meant green teas and the ones that he could get were likely low grade and stale..

I don't think a lot has changed since Orwell wrote. As a matter of fact I fear that the quality of tea, for the majority of people, has gone down and that includes green teas. The tea bag did not do any favours to quality.

JB

There's a lot of different changes, some good and other, really bad. On one hand you can get really good teas on the internet and specialty shops that were not around back then, and good strong Twinings loose leaf blends are affordable to everyone, but on the other hand people drink bottled soda drinks and insanely terrible instant mixes and bad coffee instead. Availability and affordability of good tea went way up but average tea quality that's drunk went under, just as you say.

-ak