Taste untamed: straight from nature, not flavour from a factory

There's nothing in our cup that a plant didn't put there

Most people assume tea is just tea. Leaves, hot water, done. It is one of the last things in the kitchen anyone thinks to turn over and read. Which is a shame, because the back of a tea box is where it gets interesting.

A good deal of what is sold as Earl Grey, or vanilla, or lemon, gets its taste from a flavouring made in a lab and sprayed onto the leaf. It is cheap, it is consistent, and it is entirely legal. It is also, we think, a waste of a perfectly good leaf.

We have never added artificial flavouring, over thirty-odd years. Not once. We believe tea should taste like tea: untamed, uncompromised, 100% organic.

At Hampstead Tea we use 100% organic leaves, real oils, botanicals and extracts, absolutely no artificial flavourings. We then put it all into unbleached paper bags stitched with cotton thread. No plastic funny business anywhere in your cup.

We choose the right way over the easy one

We are pretty obsessed with quality ingredients, even though real ingredients can be inconsistent. Crops vary by season, by estate, by year (much like a wine). A synthetic tastes identical every time and costs a fraction of the price. We could make our tea, and our lives, a good deal easier but we have always chosen the right way over the easy one.

Take bergamot

Bergamot is a citrus fruit grown properly in one place, Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, and the oil pressed from its peel costs 10x more than synthetic bergamot flavouring. We use the real thing anyway because real bergamot oil is bright and slightly bitter, with a lift at the back that a synthetic never quite manages. The lab version is louder for the first second and gone by the third. Ours keeps going.

So, our Earl Grey is an elegant Darjeeling leaf handpicked from the Makaibari estate, biodynamic since 1991, doused in bergamot oil from Reggio Calabria. That’s it. Well, and hot water of course.

The rest of the range holds the same principles; vanilla from Madagascar, because that is where the good stuff grows. Whole cardamom, ginger, black pepper and lemongrass in the Chai, taste-tested and tweaked batch by batch until the balance is spot on.

Every cup, the same standard. Never artificial.

Every cup we make has had its ingredients chosen and tasted with one thing in mind: tea with an untamed taste. True, bright, alive. 100% organic, and never an artificial flavouring in sight.

Put the kettle on.