Sri Lanka grew coffee, not tea, until a leaf disease wiped out the plantations before 1869 and Ceylon tea took its place. The country never looked back. Irish Cream Tea starts with that Ceylon black tea base and adds sunflower, calendula and cornflower petals along with blackberry leaves and natural flavouring, aiming for a cup that reads sweet and creamy rather than bitter, with a light floral edge and a malty backbone underneath.
The leaf comes from three of Sri Lanka's growing regions. Nuwara Eliya sits around 1,800 metres up, the highest tea country on the island, and its cool, thin air shapes a lot of what ends up in the cup. Uva lies to the east between 900 and 1,500 metres, and Dimbula lower still, from 150 to 1,000 metres, each altitude band pulling different character out of the same Camellia sinensis plant.
Tasting notes run floral, creamy, milky, malty, vegetal and even a faint coffee note, a nod to the crop this land used to grow. Black tea is the most heavily processed of the tea styles, and it carries the most caffeine as a result, around 45mg a serving, enough for a genuine morning lift.
To brew it, spoon loose leaf into an infuser, pour water at a full 100°C over it, and let it sit for three to five minutes. It holds up with milk if you want that route, or drink it black and let the floral and malt notes stand on their own. Black tea in general brings along the vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that have long made it part of traditional wellness routines, for what that's worth.
