Loose Leaf English Breakfast Tea

At Rare Tea Company, we pride ourselves on fidelity to the original craft of small-batch, meticulously blended, loose leaf English Breakfast teas. We hope they will get you beyond the morning, through every moment in your day.

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. Even colour is considered more important than quality. We don't believe in any of that nonsense. Taste is everything.

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.

The term English Breakfast was invented in New York City around 1901 to describe what British people drank for breakfast: a blend of black tea. 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 times as Ceylon tea - a term we at Rare Tea would never use) and East 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, an iconoclastic green tea and oolong blend specially created to pair with contemporary breakfasts.

We offer several types of English Breakfast loose leaf tea with distinct flavour profiles.

Our Rare English Breakfast tea is the pinnacle - with a rich and aromatic honey nose and a depth of flavour that is both elegant and complex - balanced with a deep malty finish. It is a blend in the style of an original 19th Century English Breakfast tea using only the finest leaves - including those from China - and is best drunk without milk to appreciate its elegant complexity. It is the antithesis of a modern industrial tea bag.Meanwhile, our Speedy Breakfast is our strongest loose leaf English Breakfast Tea. Cutting the tea finely allows for a quicker infusion and is especially delicious with a silky drop of milk. A remarkably rich and strong tea, it is, according to many of our customer reviews, the perfect caffeinated lift for the morning.

Our Lost Malawi English Breakfast is an 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.

English Breakfast tea can also be drunk as a cold infusion. If you enjoy iced tea, do please try our loose leaf English Breakfast Iced Tea or our Black Iced Tea - wonderfully refreshing, packed with flavour and natural sweetness, there is no need to add sugar or extra flavourings.

Many, if not most, English Breakfast tea bags contain tea "dust" or "fannings" - low-grade industrial tea. The tea is selected for price instead of flavour.

Whilst you could put higher-grade, better-tasting 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 the bag to the cup. Worst of all, they leach nanoplastics, bleaches, glues and solvents - chemicals that are used in their manufacturing process that dissolve in hot water into your cup of tea.

Even biodegradable teabags require the use of precious natural resources and chemicals in their manufacture, making them unsustainable and single-use waste.

The best English Breakfast tea is always loose leaf. Great English Breakfast teas are blended to make something better than the sum of their parts, for the best flavour rather than the lowest price. We also believe it should be direct trade - coming from farmers and their tea gardens, not brokers and middlemen creaming off the profit. The most excellent tea comes from farms using organic and sustainable farming practices. All Rare Teas are sourced under these principles.

Infusing loose leaf English Breakfast tea is quick and simple. Simply add a generous teaspoon (2.5g / 0.1 oz) of tea per cup (150ml / 5.5 fl oz) into a teapot or one of our infusers and steep for around 90 seconds. If you want stronger tea, add more tea to the pot instead of extending the infusion - longer infusions are generally more bitter.

If you want to drink your breakfast tea without milk, you will get a sweeter, more gentle infusion using water at 85°C (185°F). If you want to make English Breakfast Tea with milk, please use boiling (100°C / 212°F) water to bring out the more robust notes to balance with the milk.

English Breakfast tea, like all true tea (not herbal infusions) is rich in antioxidants and amino acids that unequivocally support a healthy lifestyle. It will also give you a lovely caffeine lift, as opposed to the rush and crash often delivered by coffee.

Because our teas are all loose leaf (we have never sold a tea bag) our tea is both eco-friendly and free from nanoplastics and industrial chemicals present in tea bags. All of our teas, including our English Breakfast Teas, are farmed under organic principles, meaning that our leaves are not covered in noxious chemical pesticides and herbicides or other additives that other caffeinated products might contain. However, we are not doctors or health experts and you must draw your own conclusions.

Finally, the type of milk or sweeteners you use in your English Breakfast tea might impact the health benefits. We are confident that all our teas are delicious as they are, and need nothing more.