FROM THE ARCHIVES:Tea in 1970 apparently was not what it used to be. Godfrey Fitzsimons investigated for this report.
IS THE quality of Irish tea getting a little . . . strained? Some people seem to think so. Mrs Nora Browne, chairman of the Irish Housewives’ Association, is one of them. She says she pays 10s a pound for hers, because that’s the only way she can get the kind of tea she used to like in the old days.
If you buy blends cheaper than that, she says, you find that the bottom of the packet is full of dust and that you have to use more tea in the pot to get a decent brew.
But if the word of Irish tea importers is anything to go by, Mrs Browne and the others are being not so much quality-conscious as plain nostalgic. Tea, the importers say, is certainly not as good as it was before the war, but it is probably better in quality today that it was, say, 20 years ago, and it is improving all the time. It’s all a matter of economics and, oddly enough, politics.
Before the war, Irish tea came almost exclusively from India, Ceylon and Indonesia, with India at the top of the quality tree, as it still is.
But when the Japanese invaded Indonesia, the supply of tea from there dwindled.
Within the last 15 to 20 years the supply gap has been increasingly filled by tea from the emergent African nations. Tea blends in Ireland now break down roughly as 20 per cent Indian, 40 per cent Ceylonese and 40 percent African, with small variations according to blender and price.
Mr Cecil Orr is a director of Irish Tea Merchants, who market the Capital and Picko brands. “About 15 years ago,” he says, “Irish importers tended to use the African teas as a cheap base for their blends, adding the more expensive Indian teas for flavour. But the African producers now have some of the most modern processing machinery in the world, and their quality is improving from year to year.”
As well, it seems that African tea gives a nice brown colour to the “liquor”, that is, the tea in your cup, and Irish tea drinkers apparently go for that. Kenyan tea is the best of all for colour.
Indian tea is now almost too expensive to drink regularly, or to include in large proportions in the average blend. The best Darjeeling from Bewley’s costs 15s 8d a pound (though they do have cheaper types at six and seven shillings).
Part of the reason is increased labour costs in the Indian tea plantations. But it is a question of global politics, too, according to Mr Orr.
The USSR, having built up a gigantic amount of credit with India for supplying railways and such, takes huge quantities of Indian tea as payment, and resells it in the West, to obtain valuable currency, like D-marks.
So is the Irish cup-that-cheers really getting less and less cheering?
Only, it seems, for those who remember what tea was like in the pre-war period. But then the summers they had in those days were far better, too.
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