Loose Leaf English Breakfast Tea

The best English Breakfast tea is not one tea, it's the one you love most, at any one moment. Like wine, we don't stick to one favourite red exclusively. Or only eat one Cheddar cheese, forsaking all others. It's the same with our favourite tea. We offer a range of English Breakfast loose leaf teas to fit your every taste and mood.

Whilst English Breakfast tea was created to be drunk with breakfast, our loose leaf tea blends can be enjoyed any time of day. Read more...

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English Breakfast tea is now more commonly found in industrial teabags made for volume and price over flavour. We keep to the original craft of small-batch, meticulously blended loose leaf English Breakfast teas. We hope they will get you through every moment in your day and your ever-changing life.

By choosing your English Breakfast tea loose leaf, you are saving trees that would have gone into making single-use teabags. Many are made from virgin plastic or precious natural resources such as corn used to make "silken" plastic mesh. Not to mention, the bleaches, glues, plastics or industrial chemicals used in their manufacturing that will get into tea and into you.

What is English Breakfast Tea?

The term English Breakfast was invented in New York City around 1901 to describe what English people drank for breakfast: a blend of black teas. Traditional English Breakfast tea often consisted of teas from different parts of the world - China, India (Assam and Darjeeling) and Sri Lanka (known in colonial time as Ceylon tea - a term we at Rare Tea would never use now) - but have more recently incorporated stronger, maltier teas from Africa.

Since the inception of English Breakfast tea in the 19th Century, our breakfast has changed. If you enjoy avocado on toast or scrambled eggs and salmon - why not try our 21st Century Breakfast blend, a green tea blend specially created to suit a more modern breakfast.

Types of loose breakfast tea

We offer a range of traditional loose leaf English Breakfast teas.

Our Rare English Breakfast tea is a blend in the style of an original 19th Century English Breakfast tea using only the finest loose leaf teas -including those from China- and is best drunk without milk to appreciate its elegant complexity.

This is the antithesis of a modern industrial tea bag with great depth of flavour and a rich and aromatic honey nose. Our Lost Malawi English Breakfast is a loose leaf English Breakfast tea that contains a blend of harvests from across a single independent tea farm in the Shire Highlands - a single estate breakfast tea with deep, rich and malty notes of caramel and burnt sugar. This tea is delicious with our without milk but if you want a really strong cuppa with milk we recommend our Speedy Breakfast.

English Breakfast tea can also be drunk as a cold infusion. If you enjoy iced tea why not try our loose leaf English Breakfast Iced Tea - packed with flavour and natural sweetness so there is not need to add sugar or extra flavourings.

Loose English Breakfast Tea vs. Tea Bags

Most English Breakfast tea bags contain tea 'dust' or 'fannings' - low-grade industrial tea lacking in real flavour.

Whilst you could put higher-grade English Breakfast tea in a bag, we wouldn't trap our lovely loose leaves. Not only does a teabag restrict the tea leaves as they infuse, preventing them from fully unfurling, but they add the unwanted flavour of bag to the cup. Worst of all, we risk leeching nano-plastics, bleaches and chemicals that were used in their manufacturing process into your delicious cup of tea. Even biodegradable teabags require the use of chemicals in their manufacture, making them unsustainable and single-use waste.

What is the Best English Breakfast Tea?

The best English Breakfast tea is loose leaf. Great English Breakfast teas are blended to make something better than the sum of their parts, for flavour rather than price and from farmers and their tea gardens growing tea using organic and sustainable farming practices. All Rare Teas are sourced under these principles.