Yorkshire Tea Traditional Loose Tea Leaf 250 g (Pack of 6)

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Green is not keen to taste these heathen teas: “It’s like asking someone used to drinking fine wines to have a bottle of cheap cider.” Nonetheless, he forces down a few mouthfuls, grimacing as if I have made him drink meths. He complains of a “furry taste” (Ringtons), being left with a coating on his tongue (Cornish) and points out some white scum that gathers in the Yorkshire bag. We decide to make each cuppa as I would at home or in the office: straight into the cup. We are not to stir – or worse, use a teaspoon to squeeze out the flavour: “Stirring it is wrong. We should let it steep itself.”

Fill a teapot or infuser with the right amount of tea. Start with 2 or 3 grams of tea per cup (unless the brand recommends otherwise) and adjust from there based on taste. Thank you British Corner Shop for supplying my Yorkshire red loose leaf tea. I make a pot every morning. It surpasses anything else out there. Whilst we can get the red teabags in Australia, they are blended in the UAE and have a completely different flavour. There is nothing quite like a proper cup of Yorkshire Tea from a proper teapot. I am so happy I can get a delivery, now travel to the UK is out of the question.It's just as common to come across a tea blend as a single-variety loose leaf tea. Longtime tea drinkers may already be partial to a certain blend, like Earl Grey or English breakfast to name a couple popular ones. Many tea brands also make unique blends outside of the well-known options. A blend of different teas, along with other ingredients, will naturally alter the flavor that reaches your cup. The main elements that loose tea should be protected from are sunlight, oxygen, and moisture. As a result, loose leaf is best stored in an opaque, airtight canister. When stored properly, loose leaf can retain decent flavor up to two years, although peak freshness is more likely to be from six months to a year. Keep in mind that tea shouldn't be perishable unless it contains ingredients that otherwise are. I can’t tell the difference between most of them – apart from the fairy-light and appleish Kinnettles, which isn’t an English Breakfast blend and really belongs in a totally different category. I decide I like Ringtons best: it is neither baggy nor crepy and has slightly smoky overtones. Yorkshire and Welsh are pretty much interchangeable: a discovery confirmed by blind tastings in the Guardian’s Manchester office, where even proud Bradfordian Josh Halliday, a lifelong Yorkshire Tea drinker, was fooled by its Welsh brethren.

I line up the teas we are to taste: Yorkshire Tea, Lancashire Tea, Cornish Tea, West Country Tea, Welsh Tea and Ringtons (which trades heavily on its Newcastle-upon-Tyne origins), plus the only tea I could find that is grown wholly in Britain: Kinnettles Gold, propagated and hand-rolled on a farm in Angus, north-east Scotland, in such tiny quantities that they produce no more than 2kg a year. But is Yorkshire Tea really the nation’s finest mass-produced regional chai? I decided to find out, with the help of Jimmy Green, an ex-military man who became addicted to tea when serving in Hong Kong alongside teetotal Gurkhas. He runs Tea from the Manor, which blends loose-leaf teas for hotels across the north-west. The aroma coming from the dried leaf is pretty amazing! It’s bright and refreshing with distinct tannin notes (that classic bitter flavour that tea has) and a hint of malt. I love how fresh it is.From there, the last step is to pour the tea into your cup if using a teapot or remove the infuser if you're making a single cup, and enjoy! He has laid out some tea leaves on a saucer. One pile, fine brown shavings, he dismisses as “dust”. That, he says, is what we will find inside all the tea bags we are to test today – blends, he suggests, that are fine only in texture. Cheap and tawdry, lowest common denominator stuff. He wants me to compare the dust with the much bigger dried tea leaves he puts into Tea from the Manor blends, which he insists will impart vastly more flavour.