Tea blending and additives

Tea blending is the blending of different teas together to produce a final product. This occurs chiefly with black tea that is blended to make most tea bags but can also occur with such teas as Pu-erh, where leaves are blended from different regions before being compressed. The aim of blending is to create a well-balanced flavour using different origins and characters. This also allows for variations in tea leaf quality and differences from season to season to be smoothed out. The one golden rule of blending is this: Every blend must taste the same as the previous one, so a consumer will not be able to detect a difference in flavour from one purchase to the next.

There are various teas which have additives or different processing than "pure" varieties. Tea is able to easily receive any aroma, which may cause problems in processing, transportation or storage of tea, but can be also advantageously used to prepare scented teas. Tea can be flavoured in large blending drums with perfumes, flavourants, or essential oils added. Although blending and scenting teas can add an additional dimension to tea, the process may also sometimes be used to cover and obscure the quality of sub-standard teas.

Although many teas are still flavoured directly with flowers, herbs, spices, or even smoke, teas with more specialized flavours are produced through the addition of flavourants or perfumes. This is particularly true for tea blends with pronounced fruit or flower aromas, which cannot be achieved with the original ingredients. Some firms such as Mariage Frères and Kusmi Tea have become quite famous for their perfumed teas.

Due to the number of scents that can be produced by the mentioned artificial methods, the section will concentrate on teas flavoured directly with the original scent materials.

A variety of flowers are used to flavour teas. Although flowers are used to scent teas directly, most flower-scented teas on the market use perfumes and aromas to augment or replace the use of flowers. The most popular of these teas include the flowers of the following:

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Wikipedia