There are two stories about its origin and we will have to choose which one we like best to then tell it around. Having spent almost seven years of my life living in Edinburgh, I'm going with the second one.
A thing by an Englishman in New York
We go back to 1843 when the Englishman Richard Davies emigrated from his native Hull, about 300km from London, to New York. There he founded the Canton Tea Company to quickly start contacting Chinese merchants and bring the best tea to the city. But as he wanted to differentiate himself from the rest, he took several of the best-selling and highest quality black teas at the time and made his own blend which he called English Breakfast, to sell it as "the most popular tea in England"
The competition started looking for his Chinese merchant to get the same tea as him, as it was a great success, without knowing it was his own blend of several teas. The search by his competitors led them to England where they discovered that no one there had heard of English Breakfast. Upon learning this, and proving he was an excellent businessman, Richard Davies expanded the Canton Tea Company and began marketing English Breakfast also in England and Europe, where it would achieve its current fame.
A thing by a Scotsman from Edinburgh
In the 1840s, a Scotsman from Edinburgh named Drysdale created the blend that would later be called English Breakfast. His idea was to sell it as the ideal blend to drink at breakfast, as back then tea was an afternoon drink, the famous five o'clock tea or Afternoon tea, or what we've called "merienda" since childhood. It is not known when people started popularizing the name English Breakfast, but it is said that Queen Victoria tried it while visiting Balmoral on a trip to Scotland during breakfast and liked it so much that she took a box back to England. From then on, the tea people used to drink at breakfast began to gain popularity, becoming the most consumed in the country.
Teytal was born in 2018 due to my fondness for this tea that I discovered in Edinburgh, hot water, English Breakfast tea, and a splash of cold milk. It is pure pleasure and the reason why today I tell you these two curious stories.
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