Calcutta known today as Kolkata, is a port city on the east coast of India and was the financial hub of British Imperial India. Less than 500 kilometres north east of this power hub was the jungle region of Assam – an area that was to become the future Imperial tea gardens of the British Empire. The two, Calcutta and Assam, were to become inseparable as producer and exporter of that oh-so-British-commodity, tea. In the early 1800’s a journey from Assam to Calcutta – a boat tr

Sunday 26th April 2015, found me jumping on a plane at Canberra airport which was the beginning of a 29 hour journey to Xinyang, China. The flight took me to Melbourne, then on to Singapore, then another connecting flight to Wuhan airport. Here I met Sarah de Witt of Impala & Peacock the Melbourne based tea company, with tearooms on Sydney road, Brunswick, Melbourne. Later we were to meet up with Nathan Wakeford of Somage Fine Foods and our two guides Vivienne and Amethyst, o

Being born in the North of England tends mean that certain things are taken for granted; you will either be a red rose (Lancashire) or a white rose (Yorkshire), you will eat pudding with your beef and gravy, and yes – you will drink your tea good and strong with milk. The milk in tea bit seems to give many of my tea colleagues a great source of ammunition for a dig at the Pom! But where did this liking for tea with milk added to it come from? There’s no exact written records