Mighty Leaf’s Organic Earl Grey was recently selected by “Everyday with Rachel Ray” magazine to compete in its Black Tea Taste Test. The results were announced in the February 2011 issue and it named our Organic Earl Grey as the “Best Earl Grey”. One of our best sellers, this tea is known for its well balanced blend of organic black tea and citrusy bergamot. 

The magazine said:

“Earl Grey (black tea flavored with bergamot citrus oil) can sometime taste bitter or astringent, but this brew is perfectly balanced. ’It has a smoky orange flavor–mmm,’ one panelist cooed as she savored this complex earthy blend. After taking a sip, another enthusiastic taste deemed it ‘pure perfection’. ”

Our Organic Earl Grey is perfect not only in the morning but throughout the day. A great alternative to coffee, it delivers an energetic boost with a unique depth of flavor and body. Organic Earl Grey  15 Count Tea Pouches are available in supermarkets and online. If you are interested in purchasing in bulk you can also find 100 Count Tea Pouches and loose tea options on our website.

Go ahead and introduce yourself to the “Earl” – we’d like to think that the original “Earl” would be proud to drink our version of this classic. Happy steeping!

Nothing like a feel good banking ad to make you aspire to be more. We thought you might enjoy seeing a local ad that was produced by the Bank of Marin, our local bank, highlighting their relationship with our company. It provides a quick peek into Mighty Leaf and introduces you to our CEO, Gary Shinner. The Mighty Leaf footage was shot at our headquarters in San Rafael, California (about 20 minutes north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge).

Mornings are slow for me. Having two kids with a third on the way will do that to you. So I jump from bed to the kitchen, and fire up a cup of something black – a strong breakfast tea, perhaps a spicy chai or I will admit sometimes even coffee. You know the drill, I am not alone. Every day tea fans around the world tame their mornings and energize with tea rituals ranging from tea cups of English Breakfast with a spot of milk to mugs of earthy Rooibos. The question arises then as to what exactly constitutes a breakfast tea?

Everyone has their breakfast tea and you could craft quite a list of potential favorites. I am going to focus on some of the classic blends and single origin teas that not only help kick start your morning but that also pair well with breakfast.

English Breakfast: Popular in the United States, a full bodied and robust black tea blend that can stand up to milk and sugar is the classic English Breakfast. The actual black tea blend varies, but is often made with Assam, Ceylon (Sri Lankan) Chinese or Kenyan black teas. Different origin stories exist, but one account claims that the English Breakfast tea blend was invented in New York during the early 1800s by Richard Davies who came to the U.S. via Hull, England. At Mighty Leaf our take on the classic English Breakfast is called Organic Breakfast.

Irish Breakfast: The Irish drink lots of tea and Irish Breakfast is a popular blend. Traditionally, the blend has an Assam black tea base from the Assam region of India. With a rich, malty flavor profile it adds a full body to the blend.  Irish Breakfast usually also contains a variety of other black teas that might include Chinese black tea or Darjeeling tea.

Scottish Breakfast: This blend can vary but often contains a blend of strong Indian or Chinese black teas with the addition of smokey Lapsang Souchong.

Russian Caravan: Russian Caravan is a blend that can include a variety of black teas including Assam and Chinese blacks, but usually also contains a hint of Lapsang Souchong. Historically, chests of this tea would travel via horseback or camelback from China to Moscow.

Assam: Used often as the base tea in many of the world’s finest tea blends, Assam also makes a delicious breakfast tea when drunk plain. I am a big fan and think that it makes a nice alternative to coffee with a full-bodied brew and deep flavor. This is one of those teas that you want to have in your cupboard as a standby for anyone who might want a good, basic cup of black tea.

Ceylon: Celyon or Sri Lankan teas are another favorite of mine for breakfast. Often referred to as self-drinkers because they are unblended, Ceylon black teas can yield a medium body with a delicate flavor that is biscuity and honey-like.

What are some of your favorite breakfast teas?

Lapsang Souchong is either a love or hate thing for tea fans. A familiar refrain is that it’s like drinking a campfire. If Smokey the Bear had a favorite tea, perhaps this would be the one. With its famous smokey taste and aroma, Lapsang Souchong is produced in the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian, China by smoking black tea in bamboo baskets over pine fires. Often made with old tea heavily smoked or blended with chemical additives to impart the unique flavor, the tea has had a reputation of suffering from poor quality. However, when sourced properly Lapsang Souchong yields a refined flavor that delivers notes of caramelized sugar and delicate smoke.
 
A good description of the history of the tea exists in The Story of Tea, A Cultural History and Drinking Guide by Mary Lou Hess and Robert J. Heiss. (Other origin stories abound as well.)  Legend claims that the tea was created by accident. During the Qing Dynasty under emperor Shunzhi (r.1644-1661) the Qing army attacked villagers in northwest Fujian in attempts to integrate the provinces of Zheijang, Fujian and Canton into one region.

With little warning the villagers fled their homes but some decided to hide their tea from the advancing soldiers. Before burying it in the mountains, they were forced to quickly dry the tea by firing it over pine freshly cut from the forests nearby the village.

When the villagers returned to dig up their tea, they thought it undrinkable. Who would like dark, glossy tea that tasted of smoke from pine fires? Ironically, the Chinese decided to offer it to Dutch traders who had been buying tea for import in Europe. What do you know, the Dutch actually liked it and purchased the tea.

Mary Lou and Robert J. Heiss write:

“The term bohea became synonymous for all of the high quality dark, leafy teas coming from the Wuyi Shan at that time.  The term black tea was not in use yet. The smokey tea eventually became known in local Fuzhou dialect as La (“pine”) Sang (“wood”) or Lapsang. As the term bohea began to be used for more and more types of dark tea, it began to carry a generic meaning. Many of the finer teas from Fujian were renamed.  Souchong was the term coined for quality large-leaf black teas from this region and their name Lapsang Souchong became the trade name for this tea.” (p. 132)

Today, Lapsang Souchong is enjoyed by those who like a tea with a bit of a twist.  Often, the tea is combined with Assam tea to create a Russian Caravan blend.  Cooking with Lapsang Souchong can be interesting too, especially if you use small amounts to impart smokey flavors to foods like tofu, fish, fowl or game. Instead of steeping the tea, you can grind up the leaves into a powder and use like you would a ground spice.

Whether you like Lapsang Souchong or not, it certainly yields a memorable cup.  We sell an Organic Lapsang Souchong that produces a complex and flavorful cup.

So, any of you Lapsang fans? If so, happy steeping and enjoy your campfire in a cup.

Reference: Heiss, Mary Lou and Robert J. (2007). The Story of Tea, A Cultural History and Drinking Guide. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press.

To most bar goers now, the martini is generic for vodka served up in a cocktail glass, or maybe even some flavored vodka concoction like a chocolotini or Appletini. But that’s not how the martini got its start. In the late 19th century up until at least the 1960s, the martini was a gin drink.

Many theories exist as to exactly how the martini was invented, exactly what it had in it, and who exactly created it, but all seem to miss complete conviction. We do know that right around the time the martini was established in a form more recognizable today (late 19th century), a drink existed known as The Martinez Cocktail: an interesting cocktail we’ll look at today.

Few drinks have persisted with the same voracity and fortitude as the martini and yet changed so much in meaning for each subsequent generation of young drinkers. Although less popular now, for many of our parents (or maybe grandparents) growing up, the Martini had dry vermouth in it.  Dry vermouth was invented by Joseph Noilly in 1813 – a mixture of 20 herbs and spices macerated into the white wine for 3 weeks and aged in small oak casks exposed to the Mediterranean sun for 12 months.

The strong character of dry vermouth needs greater care in its use and storage behind a bar. Yet, after prohibition ended in 1933, the country found itself at a loss for knowledgeable purveyors of fine spirits and skilled artisans of the bar craft. Bar culture as we knew it had inexorably changed as respectable women were now frequent bar goers and our palates had shifted into a world of cocktails dominated by sugar and fruit juice which were needed for the 13 years of prohibition to mask the low quality black market spirit readily available.

Consequently, vermouth was now let to become stale as it lingered unrefrigerated behind the lay-bar as the knowledge of how to balance its complex nature was lost. Drinkers called for less and less vermouth in their martinis and recipes for the martini shrank in their use of vermouth as we moved further away from the end of prohibition. To what is now known as the dry martini, which calls for a whisper of dry vermouth, if even that.

From its early origins up to prohibition, the martini in America had much more dry vermouth in it. Indeed, since the rest of the world did not experience prohibition, outside the U.S. the martini to this day is still conceived of as heavily saturated with dry vermouth. In fact, if you ask for a martini in Paris today, chances are that you’ll get a drink which is 100% dry vermouth.

 The first use of gin and vermouth together, as far as anyone can tell, was in a newspaper article which called to some confusion as to whether a manhattan was to use gin or whisky. This isn’t as crazy as you might think since gin’s roots in Holland were to use large portions of malted barley as a base to create the alcohol. In fact, the first published recipe for The Martinez, which many credit as appearing in O.H. Byron’s 1884 book The Modern Bartender, called for Genever, the very style of gin from Holland that used a malt heavy base.

Whether or not The Martinez was simply a variation of the manhattan, or serves as the root of what we now know as the martini, the person most often credited with its invention is Jerry Thomas. The man known as “the Professor” and the person who stylized our modern conception of the bartender as a persona and bartending as a profession, Jerry is famous for writing the first compendium dedicated to mixing drinks called The Bon Vivant’s Companion whose first edition appeared in 1862.

The Martinez calls for gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino cherry liqueur, and bitters. But today we’re making the Mar-tea-nez, a cocktail Beefeater created incorporating use of real tea to showcase its new product Beefeater 24. As gin makers use more exotic and experimental botanicals to flavor their gins, Beefeater, the only major producer of London Gin actually made in London, creates Beefeater 24, a super high end gin which uses tea leaves, among other botanicals, as a flavoring agent.

Desmond Payne, master distiller at Beefeater and creator of 24, was inspired by James Burrough, the father of Beefeater who was actually a tea merchant in the 19th century. Here is our recipe for The Mar-tea-nez using the super premium teas of Mighty Leaf which stands as our contribution honoring James Burrough’s roots in the world of tea and Beefeater 24s recognition of tea’s remarkable qualities.

The Mighty Mar-Tea-Nez

1¼ oz Beefeater 24 gin
1¼ oz Sweet Vermouth (alt. Dubonnet or Lillet Rouge)
1 bar-spoon maraschino liqueur (i.e. Luxardo brand)
1 dash Angostura Aromatic bitters
1 Mighty Leaf Organic Earl Grey Tea Pouch

Add all ingredients into a small pot and bring to a boil.  Steep the Mighty Leaf Organic Earl Grey Tea Pouch into ingredients for 4 minutes; remove Tea Pouch and let cool (for a more intense tea flavor let cool with Tea Pouch). Transfer ingredients (without Tea Pouch) into a mixing glass. Stir well over ice. Strain in to a martini glass and garnish with a lemon twist.