Purple Tea - Kenya

A tea plant that grows purple.

This is not a green tea dyed or blended into colour. It is a genuine cultivar of the tea plant, developed over decades of patient breeding in Kenya, whose leaves carry anthocyanins — the same class of pigment that makes blueberries blue and red grapes red. The bushes grow at high altitude on the slopes around Mount Kenya, where cold nights and strong sun push the colour further still.

Steeped, it pours a soft violet-grey. Add a squeeze of lemon and watch it shift towards pink; the pigment responds to acidity in front of you.

The flavour is gentler than the drama suggests — naturally sweet, lightly vegetal, with a clean and slightly woody finish and none of the astringency of a green tea. Lovely iced, where the colour really has its moment.