Wake-up tea

I like the "Malawi BOP" from Upton's. It's very cheap, strong, and malty and it's great as a start for a masala tea too.

--scott

Irish Breakfast Tea?

Pretty much any of the Assams from SpecialTeas will match your criteria. I haven't had one that wasn't decent.

The breakfast teas, Irish, English, Scottish. Any Indian commercials teas in the ethnic stores. My favorite Java teas, not cheap and hard to find. You can taste the lava.

Jim

toci wrote:

i recently stopped drinking coffee and needed a healthier substitute for it. so, i came across

I looked through Asianteadepot. I enjoy their pictures of brewed tea and their caffeine report charts. Their sampers are way more expensive than where I usually order, and their Assam teas in quarter pounds slightly more expensive. Thank you for your information, though, and good health to you. Toci

The caffeine report chart isn't very useful. It lists teas from lightest (white) to darkest (red/black) with greens and oolongs in between, even though there is no direct correlation between amount of oxidation and caffeine content. Now, if they listed the caffeine content for EACH tea, that would be very helpful. I'm sure that's too much trouble/expense for most tea retailers, though.

Now, if they listed the caffeine

Not too much trouble - it's the expense that precludes accurate caffeine listing. A reputable US analytical house with a dedicated tea laboratory charges $350 per caffeine measurement, and on contract will reduce to $210 each per ten samples. A typical tea retailer with 200 separate lines will purchase perhaps an average of 20 lb of each line four times a year from maybe a dozen different suppliers. That would necessitate 800 caffeine measurements per year if he is to accurately list the caffeine content for each tea he carries. The cost implication - of $168,000 per year - would cripple most tea retailers, or if passed on to customers at cost would be a $10.50 per lb price hike. Is caffeine information worth this much to you?

Nigel at Teacraft

These days it's expected that wineries and distilleries will have a small analytical laboratory, at least enough to do run of the mill testing. Now, I will admit that there's no simple titration test for xanthines, but still it's something that you'd expect at least a big growers co-op to be able to do on site.

A couple of years ago the folks at Wash U. were all agush about having come out with a simple dipstick test for caffeine.... I am surprised that nothing seems to have come out of that work yet.

--scott