Whole-leaf Kenyan black tea in 12 compostable pyramid bags, in a tin with a viewing window and the farmer's picture on the front. Strong and malty, with cocoa bean and dried fruit. One ingredient: Kenyan black tea.
Why whole-leaf Kenyan tea is unusual
Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea, and almost none of it is like this.
The great majority is made by the CTC method — crush, tear, curl — where toothed rollers shred the leaf into hard granules. CTC brews fast, dark and powerfully, which is exactly what a commodity teabag needs, and it is what fills nearly every teabag in Europe. It is also blunt: everything comes out in ninety seconds and there is nothing behind it.
This is orthodox whole leaf — rolled rather than shredded — which is a small fraction of Kenya's output. It releases flavour more slowly, holds more aromatic complexity, and can be brewed twice.
Why the bag is a pyramid
Not a design flourish. Whole leaf needs room to unfurl and water needs to circulate around it. A flat paper bag presses the leaf into a wafer, and water can only reach the outside — which is why flat bags are filled with dust in the first place. The shape and the contents go together.
What malty means
The word gets used loosely and here it is accurate. During processing, the leaf is withered and then oxidised, and heat drives Maillard reactions — the same chemistry that browns bread crust and roasts coffee. In black tea it produces the deep, biscuity, faintly cereal note that tea people call malty. It is the same reason a strong Assam smells of malt loaf.
Caffeine
This is declared as a high-caffeine tea. Black tea generally runs around 40–70 mg a cup, which is roughly half a coffee, though brewing time changes it substantially — a five-minute steep extracts considerably more than a three-minute one.
EFSA advises keeping total caffeine below 200 mg a day in pregnancy and breastfeeding.
A claim you will not find here
This tea is commonly sold as "free of chemicals and pesticides". Organic certification means only substances approved for organic production may be used — and several of those are pesticides. It is a genuinely better-regulated system and worth choosing. It is not an absence of agriculture, and tea is made of chemicals like everything else.
Criatura
Biohême
Criatura
Biohême
