The British are stated to like little greater than a cup of tea, however that affection is just not shared by Unilever. Its €4.5bn sale this week of a few of the world’s largest and most historic tea brands, together with Lipton, PG Ideas and Brooke Bond, exhibits how unsentimental corporations will be.
It additionally raises an unsettling query: is black tea, brewed in a teapot and served with milk, changing into a relic? Sir Thomas Lipton created one of many first international client manufacturers by acquiring plantations in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) within the Eighteen Nineties and promoting tea leaves cheaply in yellow packets. However gross sales have fallen in developed markets and Unilever will not polish its imperial jewels.
Many drinks, from fragrant tonic water to espresso espresso, have acquired premium followings in recent times. When Pret A Manger got down to lure again its prospects throughout the pandemic, it created a month-to-month “espresso subscription” (tea is included, however not within the title). Tea has grow to be handled like an aged relative: dependable and comforting to have round, however boring.
Certainly tea can do higher? Inexperienced and black teas each have medicinal qualities — ingesting tea usually has been found to cut back heart problems and even sort 2 diabetes. Tea is a gentle stimulant, with much less caffeine than espresso however sufficient to perk up the drinker, and there’s no want to change its style with sugar. What’s to not like?
Many drinks at the moment are introduced as tea, from natural teas to kombucha. Twinings does a brisk enterprise in chilly infusion — herbs and fruit essences in a bag to flavour water. Unilever owns Tazo, a US model of teas comparable to Dream, a “soothing mix of famous person valerian root, calming chamomile, fragrant lavender, almond and candy hints of vanilla flavour”. Thanks, however no.
The proliferation of natural drinks in lots of kitchen cabinets has remodeled the easy query, “would you want a cup of tea?” right into a multi-part quiz. However the factor itself — what tends to be generally known as English breakfast tea — has not superior a lot. The final burst of pleasure got here when PG Ideas unveiled the pyramid-shaped tea bag 1 / 4 of a century in the past.
The economic designer Raymond Loewy pioneered the principle of “most superior, but acceptable” merchandise; they need to push the boundaries of conference with out alienating prospects. However, like another mature packaged items, black tea has step by step regressed into its least superior, but acceptable type. As for iced tea, the American variant, let’s not discuss it.
Unilever is the prime offender, for it allowed itself to get caught with a bunch of unpromising manufacturers. It’s a battle to extract a lot style from Lipton’s yellow label tea baggage within the US, and PG Ideas is the traditional British “builders tea”. The latter was overtaken because the best-selling UK model in 2019 by Twinings, which the Queen is said to drink (not made with baggage, I assume).
However tea suffers from an id downside: the stuff we drink routinely is available in a processed type referred to as CTC (crush, tear curl) by which leaves are run through cylindrical rollers to create small pellets. This Thirties expertise produces darkish tea with a robust flavour that’s splendid for tea baggage, launched in fashionable type by Lipton in 1952.
Lipton standardised tea within the UK and US within the late Nineteenth century, making the product extra constant and safer in an period when tea packed in chests was usually adulterated with twigs and contaminants. Like Coca-Cola, Cadbury and different rising manufacturers of the time, Lipton bought reassurance.
The unique mix was additionally superior to the contents of most Lipton tea baggage in the present day. It was orange pekoe leaf tea (a grading of leaf measurement and place on the department) from his personal plantations — the Victorian epitome of single origin traceability — with brewing directions.
Tea has lengthy been rooted within the residence, in contrast to espresso’s historical past of being ready in Seventeenth- and 18th-century coffee houses and Fifties espresso bars. It grew to become a staple that was drunk across the fireside, says Markman Ellis, professor at Queen Mary College of London: “It’s home and acquainted, and it must be wilder and dearer.”
Starbucks beat immediate and mediocre drip espresso by convincing folks to pay a premium for espresso and expertise. Nespresso then supplied one thing comparable in pods. However high-end tea bars battle to get prospects excited by what feels abnormal, and I discover the tea at Costa Espresso, with the bag left floating in milky water, inferior to residence.
A revival is feasible, although. I had a pleasant cup of tea from a porcelain pot at Claridge’s resort in Mayfair the opposite day, and it was well worth the cash. Emilie Holmes, founding father of Good & Proper Tea, a tea firm in London, says that working from residence helps gross sales: “Individuals have a bit extra time to dedicate to every day rituals, fairly than dunk and sprint.”
These are components for tea that enhance each on CTC baggage and bizarre fruitiness, even when Unilever has itself misplaced the religion. Earlier than Lipton’s industrial intervention, Nineteenth-century hosts used to spoon their very own leaf blends into teapots and allow them to infuse gently for a number of minutes earlier than serving their visitors. Name it mindfulness.