Infused

by Henrietta Lovell

  Thankfully, I had only to move from one room to another to start my day. That dark winter it was bitterly cold. The ancient windows rattled their antique glass. The heating was inept, and I could barely afford to put it on. I sat before the humming computer, waiting for the screen to rediscover its light and complexity from the blank blackness. I warmed my hands around the cup. I sipped the strong black tea and it forced my eyes open. It was there for me, in my hands, warming me inside and out.

  Tea was and is my inspiration. Tea has shaped me. But my life has also shaped my tea.

  Now, in easier times, I have developed the habit of drinking an elegant white tea in the morning, but not then. Not bleary and desperate at 5 a.m. I needed a fiercer, altogether different muse. I couldn’t find space for subtle pleasures: it had to be strong black tea. I reverted to type. I’m British. I can’t help it. When things are really, really bad, we know what we need. So I started to formulate a blend to meet that need.

  I’ve made a number of English Breakfast blends over the years, for many different individuals and businesses. There’s a tendency to think we need only one, as if that will meet all occasions, but I’m not so sure. That winter I made the strongest, which I called Speedy Breakfast. I knew what was needed: flavour, masses of it. Deep, dark and malty. I blended the richest teas I could find. I went heavy on the malts to produce that comforting hit of Maltesers and Horlicks. I plunged deep into the darkest tannins for profundity but played up the chocolate and caramels to build a backbone of sweetness. I left out all the lighter subtle notes that would be drowned out by milk.

  And then I made it speedy. I had some of the teas in the blend cut fine so that they would infuse very rapidly. This would provide the initial punch, to be followed by the round, rich mouthfeel of its larger-leafed compatriots. I was trying to make tea in 3-D. Not a subtle line drawing but something with sculptural heft.

  But English Breakfast can be many things; strength isn’t its only virtue.

  The blend I made for Terry Clark is more elegant. Terry is a Royal Air Force veteran. He fought in the Battle of Britain, one of the turning points of the Second World War, where, despite being perilously outnumbered, the RAF defended the nation from aerial bombardment. I made the blend as a present for Terry, to remind him of the pre-war teas, before rationing. His tea refers to a time of understated sensibilities. We met at the Linton-on-Ouse airbase, where the RAF trains fastjet fighter pilots. I had somehow finagled a visit there to make a short documentary about the history of tea and the RAF for the Guardian newspaper online. Where the navy gave its sailors rum to keep their spirits up, and the army gave its soldiers beer, RAF pilots needed their wits about them and stuck to tea. I made tea for the pilots in their mess and was introduced to Terry. I was overwhelmed by his quiet charm, boundless good humour and astonishing modesty.

  I never expected the blend to be for anyone else but Terry. Then one day I got a call from Whitehall.

  It did give me a bit of a thrill to hail a black cab and say, ‘Whitehall, please. Ministry of Defence.’ Tea has taken me on some strange adventures, but this was the most unexpected. To enter the MoD you have to go through a bombproof airlock. Inside the vast halls, marble pillars tower over marble floors. Men in blue-grey uniforms with wings on their breasts and gold braid ringed around their sleeves inveigled me into their plans. They asked me to make Terry’s tea for them as a way of raising money for their veterans’ charity, the RAF Association’s Wings Appeal. I couldn’t refuse them. Since that day in 2009 I have been making RAF Tea and donating 50p from every tin.

  I’ve brewed RAF Tea in a disused Tube station fitted out as an air-raid shelter, as many of them were during the war; in a vintage NAAFI wagon once used as a mobile canteen; and on the wings of a (stationary) Tornado aircraft. I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of spending time with many Second World War veterans, and Terry remains a love of my life.

  RAF Tea is for a brave airman like Terry, in his early twenties and about to face the enemy in a Beaufighter, Spitfire or Lancaster. (Many incredible women piloted planes during the war, but they were forbidden from engaging in combat. Their work behind the scenes was inestimable and went largely unspoken.) A slim young man in a blue-grey uniform. His hair is brushed back, smooth and glinting like a stone in a river, a thick strand hanging loose over one eye as he squints at you through blue cigarette smoke. Above his laughing mouth is a thin moustache. He knows no fear, despite the list of dead friends whose names he toasts in gin before he drapes his heavy wool coat over the thin dress of a girl in the pub and leads her out into the cold darkness.

  RAF Tea is what he needs before the siren sounds and he must scramble his Spitfire. Strong and bold, it has a lightness and elegance, a floral lift of Darjeeling. It has a subtlety behind its malty bite. It is tenacity and courage rather than heft and muscle. It is tea made for and by someone who knows the danger ahead but is not yet battle weary.

  I’ve been through a bit since then. The Speedy blend is evidence of that. Although it might lack the elegant wisp of silk under blue-grey wool, it still has the thrilling desirability of a black leather motorcycle jacket. English Breakfast should always have power, but please don’t think it has to be fierce. For Claridge’s, the players at Wimbledon, or when racing with the Queen at Royal Ascot, something more nuanced is required. I add the sweetest Chinese black teas, with notes of honey and caramel; the perfumed aromas of the Himalayas; a waft of smoke, a dash of bright acidity.

  There are realms of deliciousness. And not even our own tastes are static. Different times and moods call for different responses. What is certain, however, is that if the English Breakfast blend you chose, at whatever moment, is really good, it’s more likely to be the panacea that sustains you. Always coming over strong and darkly mysterious, charging you with the necessary vigour, it’s James Bond, or your mother with a pistol in her knickers.

  MAKING ENGLISH BREAKFAST TEA

  Use 2.5g (one level teaspoon) per 150ml cup. The water should be around 80°C for a soft infusion without milk or 95°C to boiling if drunk with milk. Infuse for one to three minutes. One for an elegant black tea, three for a milky brew.

  CHAPTER 7

  SATEMWA ESTATE, MALAWI

  One of the most extraordinary tea experiences of my life has been the blending of black teas from different varietals and harvests from a single place, expressing the great complexity of a single terroir. It started as I turned over and over a parcel I’d received through the post, a small box completely covered in bright stamps and postmarked ‘Malawi’. I opened it to find the box was made from a cornflakes packet. I didn’t have high hopes. I assumed that African tea would be low quality and industrially produced; I knew that a lot of teabag tea came from Kenya and Malawi. I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to taste.

  I still remember the surprise of those first sips. It was deep but also elegant. There was something rich and familiar, the strong arms of someone who takes care of you, but on top of that such sweetness that I’d only associated with the finest Chinese tea. Perfect as it was, I had an inkling this tea would also stand up to a spot of milk. I put on my coat before I had finished the cup and went out to get some. It became apparent that this was something truly wonderful: with milk, it became ridiculously sugary and caramelly, almost like ice cream, like tea-flavoured ice cream. Where the finest Chinese and Darjeeling black teas, the truly delicious ones, get drowned by milk, becoming insubstantial, insipid ghosts, here was a tea that splashed about like an enchanted milkmaid. I had to go and find the man who made it. I was angry with myself for having overlooked an entire continent and not even considering that excellent tea could come from Africa.

  Within a few weeks I flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, and transferred from a nice big safe plane to a little fellow with an open cockpit door and a pilot wearing mirrored aviator shades. The flight attendant handed out a bright orange drink as thick as syrup, like undiluted orange squash, and we set off for Blantyre. It was a rauco
us flight, full of local people returning home and aid workers. (These days when I fly there, the plane is full of Chinese businessmen; a new colonisation of Africa is well underway.)

  The airport looked more like a cricket pavilion back then, with crowds standing on the balcony watching and waving as the plane landed. And there was Alexander Kay, the man who had sent me the parcel, with a couple of his children. Alex is Malawian; he was born in Malawi and speaks all the local dialects. His Scottish heritage is an interesting story to him, but he’s never been there. He lives in a local house on the farm. Most strikingly, he doesn’t have a superior attitude. I’ve seen a lot of paternalistic hauteur across the tea world, and not by any means just from white men in Africa or India. That attitude seems to come not so much with nationality or skin colour but with wealth and status. Alex treats everyone with the same thoughtful respect. He’s a gentle, kind and truly honourable man. I don’t think he even realises that; it doesn’t occur to him to act in any other way.

  We drove for about an hour to the farm, passing people living by the roadside, stalls, shanty villages with little to no infrastructure, through a land so rich and green it astonished me. My image of Africa as a scorched, desiccated place was undone. The red earth, rich in flora and fauna, was a revelation; you could drop any seed on Satemwa and it would grow. It’s a large farm, rolling through the Shire Highlands, employing around two thousand people and supporting the wider community of sixteen thousand.

  In the tasting room Alex set out the teas he had crafted from across the farm. I had never known such variety from a single estate. As the morning progressed and we made our way along the lines of tasting cups, I realised I had everything I needed to blend a brilliant Breakfast tea right there in that room. I didn’t need to take teas from across the world; all the flavour I required was stretched out across that tiled table in the middle of that whitewashed room.

  A single-estate blend is very far from the usual way to make a modern English Breakfast tea. To blend from just one farm, and not to include teas from Assam, India or Sri Lanka, is rarely done. I’ve come across ‘normal’ tea that comprises leaf from as many as sixty different farms from across several continents in order to achieve a uniform flavour at the right price point. Despite the extravagantly complicated composition, they are flat, inconspicuous and uninspiring – intentionally so.

  But these modern conventions and conformities are not universal truths. Tea doesn’t have to be blended for cost and colour and slip down unnoticed. It can be gloriously idiosyncratic, unmistakeable. The Lost Malawi blend I made with Alex attempts to express the ineffable uniqueness of Satemwa. There is so much diversity of varietal and environment and season that it was easy to break the rules. And I do enjoy doing that occasionally. Old men in suits splutter at me over their tasting spoons.

  Alexander’s grandfather originally farmed rubber. When the bottom fell out of the rubber market, he looked around for something else to grow. The local Jesuit mission had brought with them for their garden a number of tea bushes. The plants had been taken by the missionaries from China to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and from there they made their way to Malawi. That was the first tea planted in Malawi; it was the 1920s, tea had a high value, and it flourished.

  His grandfather’s house has been turned into a lodge. The first morning I stayed there I wrote this in my notebook, usually reserved for scribbled prices, harvest times and flavour notes:

  So many calls and chirrups and songs, it’s like being in an aviary. Moving out from beneath the cotton netting covering my bed and onto the veranda, I watched geckos and butterflies and dragonflies and swooping swallows.

  Tall, elegant ladies dressed in bright colours are walking along the shade-dappled paths between endless acres of tea, stepping in and out of the bright sunshine with such poise and grace, balancing great baskets and bundles on their heads, clasping the hands of small children skipping along beside them.

  An old man with a dark, lined face and dressed in blue overalls and old black wellington boots moves between a small pond and the potted plants on the veranda with a battered galvanised watering can. He lowers the watering can into the old stone pond, careful to avoid the slim red fish.

  A statuesque woman called Grace just brought me tea and stopped for a chat about her children. In another world she might have been a model or a film star. Jugs of roses from the garden fill the rooms. In the big fig tree on the lawn, squirrels and bushbabies race. Bougainvillea trail the walls and tall lilies sway in the pond. The air is rich with the scent of tea and wood smoke.

  That day, Alex and I took tea from unique Malawian hybrids across different parts of the farm. Every field has its own character and every harvest from every field of tea is different. The gradient of the slope, the way the rains seep through the land, the pH of the soil, the angle to the sunrise and sunset, determining how long the light lingers, the elevation, the presence of shade trees, the age of the bushes and their pruning cycle, along with countless other factors, affect the flavour. We worked across the farm, through the seasonal harvests, until we arrived at a precise blend we could be proud of. Of course, it fell below our grand ambition, but our search is not over yet.

  As with every blend, it must be reformulated every season. The variables of the weather, most crucially the arrival of the rains and their duration, along with the cloud cover during crucial stages of the growing season, can have a dramatic impact. Climate change is an ongoing challenge. It’s handy to know the farms intimately, to know the fields in different areas and the seasons for harvesting; to be ready to swap one tea for another or alter the ratios to maintain and improve the flavour profile. It’s not a hardship getting to know the farms so well. Especially with farmers like Alexander and with tea that good.

  Another Alexander gave the blend its name. It found a devotee in the novelist Alexander McCall Smith. He said it reminded him of what tea used to taste like. He asked me where it had gone, how it had been lost to us. I believe it began during the Second World War with rationing. We no longer had access to anything but government-issue tea. With U-boats encircling this island nation and trying to stop supplies getting in, the British government took control of life’s essentials: food, fuel and tea. It’s impossible to imagine the British getting through a war without tea. But instead of going to the grocer’s, admiring his varied collection and buying the tea you preferred and could afford, in wartime there was just a controlled amount of one tea. Tea was bought by contract with the farms, on the basis of price alone, to get Britain through the darkest times. People didn’t make a fuss; they got used to it. Anything to wash away the ash and masonry dust from their bombed-out homes.

  It might not have been the best of times nor the best of teas, but it was there when they needed it most. Tea rationing didn’t end until 1952. The revolution in China and the world war had changed the shape of international trade. Good tea became extremely rare and people had become inured to the letting go of lost loves.

  ‘How romantic – a lost tea. Let’s call it “Lost Malawi”,’ he said.

  If a wordsmith like Sandy McCall Smith hands you a name, you just put it on the tin. However, people didn’t know what sort of tea it was, so we had to give it a rather long, grand title, like an Italian aristocrat: Single-Estate English Breakfast, Lost Malawi. He had solved one problem – giving it provenance and a little romance. We still needed to give customers a reason to take it off the shelf and try it. So he wrote three stories to go inside the tins with the tea, for nothing, for kindness.

  With Sandy’s help, Lost Malawi was, and continues to be, a great success. It made its way into Waitrose, the first African leaf tea on the shelf of any supermarket, or the first identified as African. I cried when I saw it there: it had seemed so possible but also implausible. I stood there staring at the tea aisle, smearing my mascara as I tried to wipe away the tears with the back of my hand. A young man who worked there came up to me and asked if I needed any help. ‘I’m just
so happy,’ I said. He nodded, eyes wide, lips compressed, and backed away, leaving me and my tears to an incomprehensible bliss. Out in the street I saw a reflection of my face in a shop window. I had mascara smeared across my cheeks and under my nose like a pantomime moustache.

  Tea is Malawi’s second-largest export, after tobacco. But today, the price Malawi tea gets at auction is often less than the cost of production. Only the giant industrial agri-businesses can comfortably produce cheap tea in large quantities on fully automated farms to bulk up big-brand teabags. They use seasonal labour, and very little of it; almost everything is mechanised and they have vast economies of scale.

  Smaller-scale producers can’t just rip everything up, plant something else on a whim and see what happens. For the last twenty years, Alexander Kay has been trying to rebuild the quality tea production his grandfather started, crafting better and better teas. He has a responsibility to his community: it’s their livelihood, and he tries to employ as many people as he can, year round, rather than automate.

  Malawian tea does not offer the same flavour profile as Asian tea; it holds new surprises. Alexander knows every centimetre of his land and is wholly absorbed in the puzzle of revealing its unique qualities in the tea he makes.

  Some years ago, working in one particular field, Alex noticed an incredible aroma during plucking. As each two leaves and new bud were snapped from the bush, the sap of the fresh leaf scented the air with ripe stone fruit: apricots and peaches. Try as he might, Alexander couldn’t capture the aromas of the fresh leaf in the finished tea. He tried to make green tea, black tea and oolong tea, and to simply dry the leaf as a white tea, but it was no good. There were hints of the fruit aromas in the teas but never a deep flavour.