Black

Blends & flavored

Blended and flavored blacks are the world's most-consumed tea category by volume, and they range from industrially uniform to seriously crafted. Earl Grey is bergamot oil over a neutral base (the quality of both matters). Irish Breakfast is typically a heavy Assam-led blend built for milk. English Breakfast varies by producer. Masala Chai is spiced black tea, either pre-blended or built at brew time. These do not require single-origin sourcing knowledge, but the base tea and the scenting or blending quality are still worth tracking for your own reference.

teabert, the tealytics teapot, keeper of the kettle

This is the comfort shelf, Earl Grey, breakfast blends and masala chai, and it is all about how well base and flavouring get on, so a thoughtful blend tastes nothing like a dusty bag. Black tea, most of it blended, is the most-drunk tea on earth by volume, so the world's favourite tea is, on the whole, several teas at once.

Styles in this family

Earl Grey

Earl Grey is a bergamot-scented blended tea with no fixed recipe, no single origin and no processing style of its own; it is defined entirely by the bergamot…

English Breakfast

English Breakfast is a blend defined by function rather than origin: a brisk, full-bodied black tea built to take milk and start the day. There is no fixed…

Irish Breakfast

Irish Breakfast is a robust black blend in the breakfast-tea family, set apart from English Breakfast mainly by being maltier and stronger, typically built on a…

Masala Chai

Masala chai is less a tea than a method: strong black tea, almost always Assam CTC, simmered with milk, sugar, and a spice mix of cardamom, ginger, cinnamon,…

East Frisian Blend (Ostfriesentee)

East Frisian Blend (Ostfriesentee) is defined less by a single leaf than by a tradition: a robust, Assam-forward blend built specifically for the East Frisian…

How it's made

The steps overlap in practice; this is a reading order, not a set of separate stages.