What defines a daily drinker?

Rwandan black tea to meet the morning + the meaning of an everyday brew.

Call it Rwandan breakfast

The tea: Rukeri Estate black tea, sold by Camellia Sinensis. $12.55 for 100g.

There is a constellation of beautiful tea made in East Africa, with points in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and, today, Rwanda. This rich and nuanced black tea from the Rukeri Estate is made in the orthodox style, which is to say with whole leaves rather than mechanically crushed pellets, and what lovely leaves they are! See how the twisted quills are all of equal size? That’s a sign of careful rolling and assiduous sorting, so they unfurl evenly as they brew. Every time I return to this tea, it feels like a reward for good behavior. As I write, I pause to sniff my drained cup. A plum and raisin aroma lingers—a call to come back for more.

This is a classic “breakfast tea,” a black variety that’s heady enough to wake you in the morning and stand up to milk. If you like Assam or English Breakfast, you’ll enjoy the interplay of woodsy sweetness and a tongue tingling astringency. The latter is what the tea trade calls “briskness,” and it’s particularly present in the large leaf assamica variety of the tea tree. Here the briskness is tempered and subtle, allowing for greater complexity than you’d get with typical teabag fodder. A syrupy, almost resinous quality holds my interest time after time.

The source: The Rukeri Estate is one of Rwanda’s few gardens that makes traditional whole leaf tea, which they source from a coop of farmers in the Rukeri valley at more than 5,000 feet. High elevation, hilly volcanic soil, and a misty climate are ideal conditions for tea cultivation. The leaves grow slower than they would at sea level or in full sun, with concentrated flavors. When coupled with organic farming and attentive processing, the result is delicious tea. Rukeri Estate is also notable for promoting recycling policies and fair labor practices, including crackdowns on child labor exploitation and signing collective bargaining agreements with its workers. You can find Rukeri teas at many tea sellers, but I’m not surprised this excellent organic batch made its way to Camellia Sinensis, a Montreal boutique with a large and consistently high quality selection. Keep an eye out for their new Darjeeling 1st flush teas. The class of 2024 should arrive any day now, and co-owner Kevin Gascoyne always picks good ones.

To brew: I’ve found this tea to be flexible and rewarding no matter how I steep it. For a standard breakfast cup, 3 grams should be enough for 400 milliliters (1g/133ml), brewed with boiling water for 3 to 4 minutes, depending on how strong you want it. Heavier dosage with a smaller volume yields a thicker texture and nicer finish. Even with long steeps, the tea doesn’t turn bitter, and I consider that important in a breakfast tea, as I’m usually bopping around my apartment in the morning rather than keeping an eye on a timer. Notes of dark fruit and a full body are typical of this category; kicks of black pepper and tobacco are a welcome surprise. This tea would make an excellent base for masala chai—potent, yet luminous.

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The conditions for a daily drinker

Weeks ago, a tea drinking friend told me that the fancy teas I feature are fine and all, but what he really wants is a list of inexpensive Leafhopper-approved options that don’t feel like an extravagant purchase. These are what some tea people call “daily drinkers,” and what I’ve referred to in the past as “office tea.” The general idea is simple to understand—an easy to drink, not too complicated tea that’s affordable enough to steep on the daily—however I think it’s worth unpacking. If I’m honest with you, I think the standard PG Tips teabags are decent for daily drinking, and it’s hard to get cheaper than that, so why not drink that?

Not satisfied with that answer? Me neither. What does it mean for a tea to be an especially good daily drinker? What qualities matter besides price? If you make twice as much money as I do, is your budget for affordable tea twice as high?

We should explore these questions because we assign a lot of meaning to the commodities that we decide are daily drinkers. Such teas are drunk at scale, which means all the stakes—taste, price, the sourcing, and means of production—are scaled up along with them. If you grow coffee and your beans are good enough to be Starbucks’ daily drinker, that’s a big contract for you. And if the only way to get your prices good enough for Starbucks is to engage in some labor exploitation, skirting the company’s “100% ethically sourced” tagline, you’ve effectively used consumers’ faith in a good daily drinker to subsidize your poor practices.