Blend black tea from Assam and Darjeeling with green tea from Zhejiang and Fujian, add a leaf from Sri Lanka's Uva district, and name the result after a French emperor: that's Napoleon Tea, put together by Kent and Sussex Tea and Coffee Company for the Grand Hotel in Brighton. The name is meant to carry weight: nobility, history, a hint of the battlefield, and the tea leans into it. Smoke sits over the cup the way gunpowder and cannon smoke might have hung over an 18th-century battleground, and the blend is framed as its own kind of legacy left behind by Napoleon.
Underneath the smoke there's real structure: earthy, woody depth, a thread of malt sweetness, and something close to a coffee note. The liquor pours a dark mahogany, and if you already like Lapsang Souchong or a good gunpowder green, you'll recognise the family resemblance, even though this is its own five-origin blend rather than either of those. It's graded Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, and the batch behind this description was harvested mid-season in 2014.
The Grand in Brighton, the hotel this blend was made for, is a Victorian property on the town's seafront with a long-standing reputation for afternoon tea. The Independent named its afternoon tea one of the UK's top fourteen in 2015. Napoleon Tea sits within that wider house selection of blends built for exactly that kind of occasion.
Brew it with boiling water for three to five minutes, adjusting toward the shorter end if you want less smoke and the longer end if you want more. It holds up served either black or with milk. Because it draws on both green and black tea from several countries, it has long been credited with a broad range of benefits alongside that smoky, soothing character. Keep it in an airtight container so the smoke and malt don't fade.
