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 heavy proportion of Assam with some Ceylon and African CTC. It is brisk, full, and reddish in the cup, made to cut through milk, and like its English cousin it has no fixed recipe.
A malty, full, brisk cup with a deep reddish color; the Assam dominance is the defining trait against the more balanced English Breakfast. Orthodox or good CTC leaf beats fannings and dust, and thin or merely astringent material is low grade. As a no-recipe blend, named components such as a stated Assam base tell you more than an anonymous black tea label.
Like English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast is a blender's construct with no origin or legal definition, distinguished by convention as the maltier, Assam-heavier, stronger member of the breakfast-blend family (Scottish Breakfast pushes further still). The Irish association is marketing heritage tied to Ireland's very high per-capita tea consumption and its taste for strong, milky tea. Recipes vary by brand.
Western: 95-100°C, 3-4 g per 200 ml, 3-5 minutes; built to take milk and stronger than most blacks by design. Fannings and teabag grades extract fast and oversteep into harshness quickly, so watch the timer if you drink it black.
Commodity loose blend runs €5-15 (about $5-16) per 100 g. Well-sourced Assam-forward breakfast blends reach €15-30 (about $16-32) per 100 g.
Prices reviewed June 2026
English Breakfast
The benchmark breakfast blend; the side-by-side is the whole point, since Irish runs maltier and stronger.
Assam
The malty base Irish Breakfast leans on most heavily.
Ceylon
A common brightening component in the blend, tasted here on its own.
Masala Chai
Where a strong CTC base goes spiced and simmered instead of blended and steeped.
Ireland has one of the highest per-capita tea consumption rates in the world, and the strong, milky way tea is taken there is the reason Irish Breakfast blends skew so heavily toward malty Assam. As with English Breakfast, the name describes a strength and style, not a place or a recipe.