What is Black Tea

When British people say, “a cup of tea”, they generally mean a cup of black tea. It’s the foundation of the UK’s obsession with a good brew – often taken with milk and maybe a bit of sugar.

Yorkshire Tea is black tea… and so’s Yorkshire Gold, Yorkshire Tea Decaf, Biscuit Brew, and pretty much everything else we make! So, on this page, we’re going to take a look into exactly what black tea is, how it tastes and where its origins lie.

Whether it’s black, green or oolong, all tea comes from the Camellia Sinensis bush. It grows wherever the climate is right (like Africa and India) and once it’s been picked, the leaves are then processed.

For black tea, that means they’re left to wither for up to 24 hours, then they’re twisted or rolled – a process called Cut Tear Curl. That releases the enzymes inside the leaves, which react with the air (‘oxidise’) and turn from green to dark brown and black, developing lots of lovely flavour along the way. Black teas, like Yorkshire Tea, are fully oxidised.

Once their flavour has developed, the leaves we use for our teas make their way to Harrogate in Yorkshire, where we blend them together to our specific recipe and pop them into tea bags or loose leaf packs.

Black teas can be strong and punchy, with powerfully moreish traits like bitterness and astringency – but they can also be beautifully light and delicate; so gentle that you can pick out subtle floral notes.

All sorts of things impact the flavour, from growing conditions like climate, rainfall and altitude, to the minerals in the soil and what happens to the leaves after they’re picked.

And just like there are thousands of specific varieties of apples or grapes, there are also thousands of unique ‘cultivars’ of Camellia Sinensis – little genetic variations in the tea bushes that could be specific to a single region or even a single farm or estate.

These differences are easier to spot when you’re drinking single-origin tea, but blends have plenty of unique characteristics too – they’ve just got more going on, so it can be harder to pick out the specifics. Take Yorkshire Tea and Yorkshire Gold, for example: taste them side by side and you might notice that Gold is a little smoother and a little ‘brisker’ – a specific tea-tasting term that describes a lively, energetic bite. It also has a more golden colour.

Here’s a quick look at some black teas and black-tea regions, and what makes their flavours unique.