Cornflower
The intense blue petals scattered through a large share of European blended teas, most famously through Earl Grey. Like calendula it is present for appearance: the colour survives drying almost perfectly and the flavour is negligible.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Centaurea cyanus
- Family
- Asteraceae
- Part used
- Flower
- Origin
- Europe and the Near East, formerly a cornfield weed
- Drunk in
- France, Germany, Poland
Character
Essentially neutral, with a faint hay note at high concentration. It is in the packet so that the packet looks like something.
Notes: hay, green
History
A weed of European grain fields until herbicides removed it in the twentieth century, and now grown deliberately for the blending trade. Its association with Earl Grey is a twentieth-century blending convention rather than anything to do with the original tea, which contained no flowers at all.
How it is drunk
Not drunk alone in any tradition. Its entire modern role is as a visual component of blends, and it is the flower most likely to be in a packet of flavoured black tea.
Production
Petals are stripped from the head and dried fast at low temperature, because the blue pigment is heat-sensitive and browns quickly. Retention of the blue is the entire grading criterion.
Preparation
Blended with tea · Infusion
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
Blue petals in a blend indicate a blender’s decision about appearance, not quality. A blend can be excellent without them and poor with them.
Common mistakes
- Reading the flowers in an Earl Grey as a sign of grade. They are a house style and nothing more.
Related botanicals
- Calendula — The two petals present in blends for appearance rather than taste, and the two most often mistaken for a quality signal.
Comparisons
- Cornflower vs calendula — The two petals present in blends for appearance rather than taste, and the two most often mistaken for a quality signal. Neither contributes flavour and both survive drying beautifully, which is the point.
- Cornflower vs blue mallow — The two blue flowers that turn up in European blends. One is a fixed blue that contributes nothing else, and the other changes colour on contact with acid and has a texture worth noticing.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. Twenty of the 150 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Cornflower is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.