
With the upcoming release of our FIRST EVER blended Ripe Puerh Tea cake I thought it would be a nice idea to share my thoughts on blending, some info on blending itself and a really satisfying and easy Breakfast Tea Blend that you can make at home! Do you have some old tea that you find boring or is lacking in some respect? Try mixing out with something else and see what happens! Some would call it sacrilege but if it’s hanging around and you don’t like it anyway, then give it a shot and have some fun!
Is blending a dirty word?
The market definitely changed at around 2010 onwards with more and more single estate Puerh tea cakes being created. This is indeed a great thing. Educationally you can begin to distinguish the nuances between not just regions but also sub regions. this has been pushed forward in latter years with sub plot or even single tree puerh tea cakes where the nuances become even tighter and focused but more pronounced. All this is great, but are we forgetting something?

It seems that blending has been seen as more of a dirty business since the market turned. Blending has been associated with large scale factory offerings and low brow to mediocre tea. It’s not an unwarranted view, i’m a purist heart also but there is something to be said about the creativity and passion for attempting to create a banging tea through blending. Think about it, why do people love Dayi (Menghai Tea Factory) tea so much? I mean, it certainly isn’t for the ‘bang per buck’. Aside from the reliability in its aroma profile and aging, they also really know how to make a good blend, that’s for sure. There are a few boutique blend cakes out there that offer high end blends but it’s a shadow compared to the single estate market. For me, I look to blends for the COMPLEXITY in flavour, something that is very hard to find in a single estate offering.
Why blend?
Something out of nothing: Blending is a good way to disguise flaws in bad batch tea. An example being that one specific batch from one farm might be very high in astringency, it would be very hard to shift on its own and of course you’ll get a good price for said tea. Another batch may have a very intriguing flavour but no backbone behind it. Marry the two up and you have collectively a good tea. This principle can be applied to lower end, mediocre and very high quality Gushu. Believe it or not, there is some pretty bad Gushu out there that is lacking in one form or another.
Repetition: for Dayi and other big brands (including the tea bag giants) repetition is vitally important. Why? They are in the market of reliability. They need their customers to know that when they buy their product in 2025 is going to taste exactly the same as it did in 2024 they achieve this by blending. Seasonal differences, drought, too much sun, and many other factors mean that a farm cannot produce the exact same tasting product from year to year. This means that it’s down to a panel of tea tasters to get the correct blend that will exactly mirror the brands taste no matter what year it is

Making something special: Some boutique producers out there will go out of their way to make something truly spectacular out of crazy material. We did it before, ‘4TheLolZ’ was a crazy blend of 20 top tier Yiwu area Gushu (currently offline and aging further in HK), the results were fascinating. We basically got 2 kg of this tea, mixed it all up in a box and got it pressed. The deep syrupy sweetness was on another level and the Chi hit like a train, in a very discombobulating fashion. Even the energy in this cake was complex, I didn’t really know what was coming from where!
How to blend tea:
Blending doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, our new recipe for ‘ShouBaka’ is a simple 50-50 mix. The big houses will most likely have 20 different types of tea in any given recipe but you don’t need to go to those extents. When conducting a blend you need to consider what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to improve on a bad batch or try to create something special? So I would say that the material used for ShouBaka was lacking. The first batch was insanely sweet but lacked any form of structure and not much flavour behind it. The second batch had lots of structure and base flavours but little else I basically put them both together and created what I believe to be an incredibly beautiful and thrifty blend!
Try to remember what makes a good tea GOOD. Taking into account not only flavour but also structure, bitterness and stringency, they all play a part. It can be a balancing act between the forms of the tea.
Consideration must be taken into account with the ratios. One needs to remember that any nuances considered desirable in one batch will be diluted to a point where it may even become indistinguishable in the end blend. Maybe try picking batches with exaggerated profiles, very sweet, very smooth, very stringent, very bitter, this will definitely help creating an easy to produce blend.
You need to remember that when blending there will be inconsistencies whilst dealing with small batches, you won’t truly know how the blend will come out unless you do at least a one or two kg blend. This is mainly information for producers to be honest. When blending at home it doesn’t really matter just have some fun.
Easy Breakfast Tea Blend:
I first created this banging blend back in 2013 from material sourced here in old Blighty and I’ve never before shared it. it’s dead easy, I’ll get in looseleaf tea and decided to go to Selfridges, you know the place where the Queen did her shopping or got one of them minions to go shopping for her LOL. Anyway, I was trying a few different types of loose Leaf and wasn’t 100% happy with them on their own and then started messing around. I discovered that two parts Darjeeling with one part Assam is an absolutely perfect breakfast tea with milk. This is a really easy source and simple recipe that you can try at home. You might even get the blending bug!
Thank you for getting to the end of my blog. It would be interesting to hear if anyone out there has given blending at home ago, please leave a comment or send me a message 😊. Oli