A nice cup of tea in the Regency? Not always
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Expand this to the British, Irish, & Australians are not judges of good tea, right up to the present day.
It continually amazes me that British tea drinking culture is held up as some sort of epitome to aspire to (usually by US Americans). As this article details well, the great majority of tea consumed in the UK was and continues to be at the very lowest levels of quality (even if it is not widely adulterated as it was in the past). The only places with good tea drinking cultures and where people are judges of good tea are where tea is grown and has been grown for centuries. That is China, Japan and Taiwan. (And to a much lesser degree, India and Sri Lanka).
The poor in the article though had it very different. They couldn't order a new tea online, nor trivially discuss tasting notes with people in China, Japan or Taiwan for example; I think that's worth noting.
One country I neglected to reference and which should be listed ahead of India and Sri Lanka is Vietnam. Here is a good overview of that country's history of tea cultivation and its present state:
https://specialtyteaalliance.org/world-of-tea/vietnamese-tea...
This was an age when many things at average and cheaper prices were adulterated. There were assorted ways of reusing tea and coffee by adding spices and chemicals to once used remains, not just the example discussed. Even expensive was no guarantee of purity as few could tell when something had been adulterated, or often what pure and fresh was meant to taste like. Things aged and changed taste considerably in the weeks or months on ship - there's a few coffees and teas that still try and simulate this effect - Monsooned Malabar is one well known one.
Bread used to contain alum, chalk and other things to bulk and colour it. So did sugar, flour, pepper, well, you name it. Adulteration remained endemic, both sides of the Atlantic until food legislation and associated testing started to arrive in the later 19th century.
Yet tea drinking - almost exclusively black tea from India when it arrived in quantity - which became a huge part of Indian trade, took off. At the better end this developed into a culture was more than had existed in India or China. Emphatically not better, more and different - it was a combination of British and tea drinking from China or India. Rather like Chicken Tikka has almost become the staple British dish - that is a combination of British and Indian today. Like the cliche obsession with making the perfect espresso today, a couple of decades ago every Brit had an opinion on how to make a decent cup of tea. Clearly this has to start with ignoring tea bags entirely, or you will get what you deserve. :)
I will very quietly note that getting a decent cup of tea in any of my US visits proved possible, but damn it was hard work. :)
[1] http://www.englishtea.org.uk/tregothnan_english_tea.html
[0]: https://www.imperialteas.co.uk
I suppose it's similar to how I sometimes crave a cold cheap lager on a hot day rather the red wine or "fine" beer I usually go for. Cheap lager is what I drank when I was a student and it has positive associations for me. It has very little to do with my capacity for discriminating between good quality beer and low quality rubbish — just that sometimes a pint of gnat's piss really hits the spot.
I can imagine that those mountains that rise sharply behind the Black Sea coast could produce a good tea growing micro-climate.
> Da Hong Pao can sell for up to US$1,025,000 per kilogram
And those 6 trees were bought insurance by the local government for 100 million RMB (~=15 million USD).
The name of Da Hong Pao means the emperor's red robe. In the most productive year, those trees only grow hundreds of o grams of tea.
There's also an interesting section in the Chinese version Wikipedia: When Nixon visited China in the 1970s, Mao gave him 200g Da Hong Pao as present. Actually, that's half of the annual production.
It wasn't long ago that Celestial Seasonings was caught adulterating their concoctions (technically, "tisanes") with toxic ingredients. A reference to the incident may be heard in Scott Pilgrim vs The World, when Mona Flowers lists off what kinds of tea (and tisanes) she has. Listen carefully, enough times, and you will hear "liver damage" listed among the choices.