Germany: At Tea Leaves, many of our teas make their way to us via Germany. It’s a little known fact that Germany is really the place to go when it comes to the craft of tea blending and flavouring. For this very reason, there’s lots of obvious tea choices for our Tea Safari trip to Germany (Berries of the Forest for instance), but I thought I’d go with East Frisian Blend because it has such a quirky little story attached to it. For those of you who have as good a grasp of geography as I do, East Frisia is in Northwest Germany and was historically the point at which tea came into Germany via the Netherlands. The Germans may love their ‘tee’ but the East Frisians really love their tea, consuming an average of 2.5kg kilos of tea leaves per person each year. (If you’re from East Frisia, I’ll just mention that Tea Leaves will give you a discount for buying in bulk.) This is the proper way to drink East Frisian Blend: A ‘Kluntje’ (a white rock candy sugar that melts slowly) is added to the empty cup then tea is poured over the Kluntje. The tea represents water, the sugar represents land and lastly a heavy cream cloud (‘Wölkje’)is added to the tea. In this way, a cup of tea prepared in a traditional ‘Ostfriesische Teezeremonie’ contains all the elements of the East Frisian landscape. Drinking a cup of East Frisia tea is about tasting each contrasting flavour - first the cream, then the tea and finally the sweet taste of kluntje at the bottom of the cup. The teaspoon is provided not for stirring, but for signalling that one has had enough tea. tealeaves.au/classic-blend-east-frisian/w1/i1006575/
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 10:30:00 +0000