The standards of tea-making for which we are known are a source of enduring pride and comfort
I SHALL remember 2010 fondly as the Year of Lowered Expectations. It’s much easier to be happy when the bar keeps dropping. We may not have burned bondholders, but our dreams certainly got torched. Now with this weather, we can even throw aside minor concerns such as next month or even next week. It’s all about today, which can be counted a success if you secure bread, milk and a bag of coal. For entertainment, we delight in feeding the birds. I haven’t been this content all year.
Once you get the water back on, a cup of tea becomes a triumphant reward. On that point, I have to tell you that 2010 was also the year where my choice of tea closely tracked my psychological relationship with the recession.
Earlier this year a determined economy drive prompted a sad decline in standards. At the time, 160 Barry’s tea bags were €5.99. Tesco’s own brand box was just €2.99. Half price! I had to try them. I did, and soon was bragging about my cheap but acceptable tea bags. But I made a boast too far.
I told one friend who was genuinely appalled. Not only was I using tea bags, but cheap English tea bags. A jaw dropped, the eyes widened, definitely an intake of breath, and then a lecture on the inviolability of that one thing we Irish can absolutely, completely and without any doubt take credit for – a proper cup of tea.
My self-congratulation on economic tea was brought to a grinding halt. I was told that the English have appalling taste in tea, and to abandon the superior Irish product was a crime against culture. Good tea is as Irish as O’Connell, Joyce, Bunreacht na hÉireann, green fields, shamrocks and Riverdance. I ventured that I had become accustomed to the blacker variety offered by Tesco on account of my husband’s preference for strong tea and the fact he is the principal tea-maker in the household. Well naturally, observed the friend, he is from Northern Ireland, and has been reared to different tastes.
“But you!” he accused and reminded me of who I was and where I came from. A house where tea was loose leaf, made in a twice heated pot, put to draw on a stove and drunk from a china cup. I had betrayed my roots, my people, a standard of living, a tradition, a way of life – it just wouldn’t do.
Well, I had to reassess the situation after that. I began with fact-checking.
Paul O’Toole, coffee and tea buying director at Bewley’s, confirmed that the Irish are famous for their high tea standards.
Tea is sold through public auctions at origin and at weekly sales in Mombasa, with the best tea, fetching the top prices, being destined for Ireland. History has taught Irish tea companies to dismiss any notion of cheating their customers – any company that tweaked their tea went out of business within five years.
The exception was good old Peter Barry, the best taoiseach we never had. He introduced Kenyan equatorial tea into Ireland in preference to the Indian orthodox tea that was traditionally preferred. That worked because Indian tea is shipped just once a year, whereas east African tea ships all year round – and we preferred the fresher variety.
On the matter of tea bags, O’Toole provided great reassurance and also a fascinating measure of changing habits. Lyons brought tea bags to Ireland in the late 1970s, and when O’Toole began his tea-training in 1979, they accounted for just 4 per cent of the market. He remembers tea buyers at the time stating that the bags would “rot on the shelves”, and the Irish consumer would never accept them. But thanks to the high standards, the rise of the tea bag was inevitable. The average Gold Label tea bag consumed in Ireland is considered a very high grade speciality tea in any other country. This is why Irish people always bring tea bags on holidays.
In 1980, tea bags had eked out a mere 5 per cent of the market share. By 1985, it was 20 per cent. By 1990 it was 60 per cent; in 1995, 75 per cent, and today tea bags account for 93 per cent of all tea sold in Ireland. Many have pondered whether the new habits represent modernisation, urbanisation, time poverty or the fundamental reorganisation of households from large families to single occupancy. Or maybe we were just sick of cleaning tea leaves out of the sink.
O’Toole also explained the background to the prejudice that tea bag tea is vastly inferior to loose leaf.
As demand for tea bags started to grow, the tea factories had to produce a smaller leaf – otherwise you wouldn’t get an infusion in the bag. In a disastrous marketing move, the tea trade called the new leaf “Pekoe Dust”. Once people heard the name “dust”, they assumed this was what was left over after they made the good stuff. Not so. It’s the same tea.
Well, after this briefing, I hastily recanted on the temporary heresy into which I had fallen and declared proper tea a justifiable recessionary treat. Now it’s Barry’s Gold Label loose leaf for a big pot at 11 when our household pauses for a traditional brew. For the handy reviving cuppa at other hours, I’m sticking with Bewley’s Gold Label tea bags. Mild ostentation perhaps, but no self-reproach. In a year when we lost so much, clinging to what we have left seems like the decent thing to do.