black tea recommendation / AHMAD TEA - DARJEELING

Here is today’s black tea recommendation.

Prepare today’s tea and hot water.

Today I have prepared Darjeeling from Ahmad.

Ahmad is the tea you’ll be able to find easily compared to other teas.

I think Twining is the most common black tea brand you can find in Korea except for Lipton.  

I guess Ahmad is the next most common.

It’s not that Twining or Ahmad has overwhelmingly stronger brand power compared to other brands.  

I think the companies that import these teas are bigger than other companies.

They seem to have outstanding distribution ability.  

So that’s why we can find these 2 tea brands in Korea easily.  

And they’re both quite affordable not because of distribution channel but because they both are quite common brands in their local areas as well.

When Café Planet was first opened, we only used Ahmad.

I barely knew anything about teas then.

That takes me back to those years~ J

Ahmad tea tastes and smells like very typical English tea.

Most premium brands are made from England or France.

There are some German or Russian companies but the portion is very small compared to England and France.

However, the tea cultures in these two countries have formed very different from each other.

The biggest difference is the people who enjoy the teas.

Males were the main people who enjoyed black teas in England though we don’t really think this way any longer.  

It was known as gentlemen’s tea.

In France, tea culture spread out starting with noble women.  

Therefore, tea brands developed from each country showed different aspect.

In England, the black tea developed by concentrating on its natural taste and scent.

In France, flower or sweet scent had been added to teas and scent-added black teas had been developed.  

Also, soft teas rather than intense teas were at the center of the development.

Ahmad is the English tea and it pursues intuitive taste and scent just like English tea brand would do.

Preference changes as time goes on, but I’m more into French brand these days even if I’m a man… J

The advantage of Ahmad’s Darjeeling is that you can get one easily…

I couldn’t find anything that impressed me so much.

But I couldn’t really find anything bad from it either.

I would recommend this tea to those who drinks black teas everyday with bunch of tea bags just stacked up in their drawer.