English Breakfast vs Earl Grey, Irish Breakfast and Assam: What Is the Difference?

Ireland drinks more tea per person than almost anywhere, and the Irish taste has long been for the heaviest teas, with plenty of milk. Assam was the base; Darjeeling was dismissed as too light.

Our Irish Breakfast Black is a robust, lively cup: malt from the start, sweet dates in the middle, and high-fired, cocoa-like edges. As we put it in 2016, it is “perfect with a dash of milk.” The full story is in our guide to Irish breakfast tea.

Why the Irish cup is stronger

Peter Keen traced the habit for us in 2017. Ireland shares the world’s highest tea drinking per person with Turkey, well ahead of England. Incomes were once so low that only poor, weak leaf was affordable, and the Irish answer was the kettle kept on the hob, brewing all day to draw out every bit of flavor, with milk and cream to soften the harshness.

The African teas in Irish blends have a history too. During the Second World War, Ireland’s neutrality cut its supplies from India and Ceylon by 75%, and the government and tea firms began buying directly from growers, first in Kenya and then in Rwanda. In 2017 the leading Irish brand made a point of naming Rwanda: CTC tea, “not fine whole leaf,” and in Keen’s words “eyebrow-bleaching strength.”

So the difference is less about where the teas grow than about how strong the blender pitches the cup. English Breakfast aims for balance, with some brightness from Ceylon or Keemun; Irish Breakfast aims for weight and color, for a cup that will take a lot of milk.

Earl Grey is fragrant and zesty and is usually drunk without milk; English Breakfast is malty and full and is made to take milk. Our training deck draws the same line: English Breakfast is a straight blend of tea with tea, while a flavored tea is a base tea plus spices, flowers, fruit or a flavoring, which is what Earl Grey is.

The two are often closer than they sound. Our Classic Earl Grey Citrus Black uses Assam black tea as its base, the same tea that anchors English Breakfast, with pure bergamot extract on top: sweet, malty and caramel-like underneath, with a brisk citrus lift. If you like your morning tea strong but want something more aromatic in the afternoon, it is an easy step across.

Our product data shows how close they are. Both are tagged as morning and breakfast teas, and both carry our “high” caffeine label. The Earl Grey’s tasting notes read “intensely sweet, robust, brisk,” with caramel, bergamot and malt and a long, sweet citrus finish, and our tasters suggest drinking it plain. We once made a tea that sat between the two: a Breakfast Earl Grey on long, wiry, golden-tipped Assam leaf, with a strong, malty cup.

In 2016, our blog put English Breakfast at around half of the packaged tea market in the UK and the USA, with Earl Grey at perhaps a quarter. Green tea, for all its attention, was under 15%. Read the full story of the blend in Earl Grey tea.

Assam is the natural backbone. Our training deck notes that Assam is used extensively for breakfast teas and chais, and to add strength and color to other teas.

Keen suggested thinking of Assams as “English Breakfasts with attitude.” He took a standard, better-quality English Breakfast as the reference, and found that “a broken-leaf Assam is close to a good English Breakfast,” full and with plenty of body. If you like your tea with milk and sugar, he wrote, “the bigger the Assam the better.” For more character, he named the whole-leaf estates Harmutty, Halmari, Mangalam, Doomni and Chota Tingrai.

Our own range blurs the line. Our English Breakfast Black is itself whole-leaf summer Assam, and our Classic Assam Black is a full-bodied, mellow second flush Assam with notes of malt, date palm and yellow raisins. To taste a single garden, try Halmari Summer Black, Harmutty Summer Black or Doomni Gold Summer Black. More in Assam tea.