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Teas sold for the Indian market

I have often lamented the fact that the quality of tea sold in American supermarkets is so poor. Red Rose is the only "regular" supermarket tea I can tolerate, and even that seems rather weak to me lately. I have been ordering most of my teas online, buying PG Tips and Yorkshire Tea in bulk. It gets expensive after a while, especially since I drink so much tea.

While persusing this newsgroup, I saw some posts about buying tea from Indian grocers. It had never occurred to me to do this before, but since I like strong British-style teas, I thought I would give it a try. There is an Indian grocer down the road from me. I had never been in there before. They had quite an extensive selection of teas from Tata/Tetley, Brooke Bond, and Lipton. They had Lipton Green Label loose, which is a Darjeeling blend, and Lipton Yellow Label loose and bagged. I had Lipton Yellow Label in Europe several years ago. It did seem better than the Lipton sold in the US, but I only had it in hotels and restaurants where it was not prepared properly with boiling water, so it was hard to tell.

Anyway, I decided to try some of the Brooke Bond varieties, since I am still somewhat biased against the Lipton name, due to the hellbroth they try to dupe Americans into believing is tea. I bought some Brooke Bond Red Label teabags, and a large carton (216 bags) of Brooke Bond Taj Mahal. 216 Taj Majal bags cost $6, about 1/3 of what I was paying to buy PG Tips online, and that does not include the shipping costs.

I have just brewed a pot the Taj Mahal and it is excellent. It is extremely similiar to PG Tips; I would not be surprised if it were the exact same blend packaged differently. And the price is certainly right.

Next time I may try some of the Lipton teas just to see what they are like. I have heard that they are far superior to the Lipton sold in the US, not that it would be hard to accomplish that. I know that teas are blended differently to suit local tastes, but I just cannot understand why Lipton can't sell a decent quality blend at a reasonable price in America, when they seem to be able to do so in the rest of the world.

Anyway, much thanks to those who suggested the Indian grocers. I will be buying a lot of tea there in the future.

Regards,

Rob

Reply to
Rob
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Lipton has a tea shop on the 11th floor (I think) of the Tokyo Prince Hotel, just near to the Tokyo Tower and across the street from where I used to work. I went there a few times. The staff was nice and typically innocent. Like many places, all they know is their brand. They were so impressed by my smidgen of limited knowledge that we had to trade business cards and hopefully speak again soon. It will never happen, but it was nice anyway. Lipton is crap. That is all there is to say. Brooke Bond sells a lot here in Japan as well. Brooke Bond is also crap. These companies blend away any genuine flavor that there is in their teas by mixing everything from their former Indian, Sri Lankan, and African slave colonies. There are how many tea producing areas in Sri Lanka alone? More than a dozen major areas and all with very distinctive flavors. Check the Sri Lanka Tea Board website at

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The former imperialist view is that if it isn't strong enough mix it with something totally different until the water turns brown. Ugandan tea and Kenyan tea themsleves are quite different. Who in their right minds would mix Assam and Uva? These people have no respect for the tea itself and especially for the ignorant American consumer. They sell the LOWEST grade of garbage to Americans purposefully. Americans should boycott them completely. If you want a good strong black tea drink what Indians drink - nilgiri from south India. These people know more about tea than the English, without a doubt. They don't add anything to it and enjoy it for what it is. Nilgiri is, however, perfect with milk. It is sad that the ignorant masses in most areas outside of South Asia will never hear of it. And since these people have lost a good portion of their population and industry in recent tsunami attacks I believe they could use your money more than former imperial powerhouses who made their fortunes off the toil of the third world.

Bitterly,

Rufus Firefly Tokyo

Reply to
Rufus T. Firefly

I get all the BB brands you mentioned as loose tea. BB also has an excellent darjeeling called Supreme. Lipton also has a Green Label version called Connoisseur. It comes in tin cans vs paper for regular Green Label. Unilever Lipton India is different than Unilever Lipton US. If you compare the product lines you'd wonder if the two companies know each other exist. Another good source of British brands is Arabic markets which carries PG Tips and Yorkshire. If you live in a large metro area and can shoppe around you'll find all the commercial name brand teas from your country of choice in local ethnic markets.

Jim

Rob wrote:

American

Yorkshire

water,

reasonable

Reply to
Space Cowboy

Thank you. I've been finding the brands that I want but I've been paying an inflated price for them. It never occurred to me to look in the Asian or Arabic markets. Even if I had thought of it, I probably would have assumed that they'd be equally expensive.

It's a pity that we can't get this quality of tea in our own supermarkets. Even a brand like Red Rose, which I consider decent, is not as strong as I would like, since American teabags are smaller and contain less tea than British ones.

I really wonder sometimes if Americans aren't tea drinkers because the quality of tea available in supermarkets is so poor, or if the quality is so poor because Americans aren't interested in good tea. A Catch-22, I suppose.

I am also beginning to think that the Lipton sold in the USA is primarily meant to be used for iced tea, rather than hot. I can't imagine why they'd deliberately blend such a weak, pale and astringent tea otherwise, especially when the company has proved it can produce better teas in foreign markets.

Anyway, thanks again for the leads.

Space Cowboy wrote:

regular

companies

Reply to
Rob

I second the choices of BB Supreme and Lipton Green Label Connoisseur (or even plain Green Label). These are sold as 100% pure Darjeeling teas (although blended from different gardens and flushes, for sure).

Still, these are great values compared to the single garden teas from Upton etc. Definitely worth a try.

I wonder if any "insider" here has information on the gardens used by Lipton and Brooke Bond for their blended Darjeelings ...

Reply to
Aloke Prasad

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