Coffee Breakfast

All hail the queen ... and a good cuppa' English Breakfast?

English Breakfast is often a tea lover's staple, so let's define it: This is a blend of tea from several spots around the world, including Assam, India; Ceylon (also known as Sri Lanka), and Kenya (and if Kenya as a big tea producer surprises you, check out this quick two-minute video taken inside a Kenyan tea facility). But here's the main point: It's black tea that brews up strong and dark, sometimes people refer to it as "full-bodied" or "robust", and it works well with milk and sugar.

As often seems to be the case in tea culture, since the history of tea dates back hundreds of years, nobody is entirely sure how this blend of tea became known as "English Breakfast, " although having a strong cuppa' black tea with breakfast has long been a custom in England. One story has an English immigrant to the United States selling a blend of tea he called English Breakfast during the 1840s, and when that blend became popular, the name spurred imitators. Another account says that Queen Victoria popularized the blend, and was then just called "Breakfast Tea."

But here's an important distinction: English Breakfast tea is always a blend of teas from different places, whereas tea referred to as Assam are only from tea gardens in Assam, India. We refer to our own whole leaf Assam as "Organic Assam Breakfast" to make it clear that when it comes to our sachets of real, whole-leaf organic tea, this is the one you'd pick if you want a full-bodied cup of black tea at the start of the day (or, well, anytime). We also sell that delicious, single-origin tea loose! But we also offer a delicious, traditional English Breakfast blend in our line of Paisley Label Tea. Paisley Organic English Breakfast is our blend of quality black teas from different gardens in India, and rather than being whole leaf, this tea is a finer cut that brews up fast when you steep these traditional paper teabags. Our CEO and Founder Richard Rosenfeld likes his first thing in the morning, and he uses two of those teabags in a large cup, steeping for a short period of time.