Consistent quality and extraordinary flavour. Every single time.
At Twinings, our expert blenders select teas from thousands of different tea estates to find the precise leaves that when blended together will deliver the exact flavour for a particular blend. With factors such as weather, altitude, moisture, soil and season each contributing to a tea's characteristics, the importance of the blender's art is inestimable.
Twinings is also one of the few beverage companies that blend the herb and fruit ingredients at our factories, rather than buying in pre-mixed blends for packing. This ensures that we control what goes into our products, and that the recipes are unique to Twinings.
Since no two harvests of tea are ever alike, even if they come from the same garden, the art of blending is extremely complex and immensely important.
Did you know?
Early Australian settlers brewed tea in a tin can called a "billy". Today, their ancestors still drink "billy tea".
Hand in hand with the art of blending tea goes the skill of tasting it. Our tea tasters and blenders train for five years before they are fully qualified, although they are constantly learning and developing their skills.
Preparing Tea
The taste of perfection.
Creating the best-tasting tea is a complex, skillful procedure. While the process of blending teas to produce specific flavors is quite involved, there are four main steps in the process.
1. Taste it.
First, small samples of tea are obtained from tea brokers and tasted for quality, flavour as well as being assessed for colour. Once approved, the teas lucky enough to be selected for Twinings teas are then purchased from specific tea gardens around the world.
2. Test it.
Our blenders will now select teas to produce the desired blend. A comparison of taste is made against a "benchmark blend" for each of Twinings flavours ensuring that the Earl Grey you brew in your cup today will have the same original flavour as that blended for the 2nd Earl Grey himself.
3. Brew it.
At this point, each specific sample blend is brewed, and undergoes a methodical tasting procedure: freshly drawn water is boiled in a copper kettle and poured over 5g of tea in a special white, lidded ceramic cup. The leaves are infused for precisely six minutes, after which the "liquor" is poured off into a bowl ready for tasting. Up to 30 different sample tea blends may be laid out for the tasting.
Did you know?
Dozens or more different teas are used in the creation of a single flavor. It can take up to 70 teas blended together to make English Breakfast tea.
4. Perfect it.
Tasters examine both dry and wet leaves, judging the brew's colour and clarity. Then, using special spoons, tasters suck the tea sharply against their palates spraying the liquid against the back of the mouth where the sense of taste and smell meet and then expel it into spittoons. So well seasoned are tasters' palates that they can identify the location, elevation and growth characteristics of the sample, helping them detect the slightest variation on the standard they seek.