A blend name is a style, not a formula
None of the classic blend names has a definition maintained by anybody. There is no register of what may be sold as English Breakfast, no minimum bergamot content for an Earl Grey, no specification for a chai. Each name describes a rough target — a strong black tea for the breakfast blends, a citrus-scented black tea for Earl Grey, a spiced black tea for chai — and everything else is a commercial decision made afresh by every producer. This is not a scandal and it explains most of the confusion buyers have with the category. Two Earl Greys from different sellers may share a name and nothing else: different base teas from different countries, different flavouring preparations at different doses, and a price difference of an order of magnitude. The practical consequence is that a blend name is a starting point for a search rather than a description of a product, and that a buyer who liked one Earl Grey has learned about that blender rather than about Earl Grey. The fields that actually describe such a product are the base tea, the flavouring and the seller, and only the last of those is reliably printed.
Earl Grey, and the range it covers
Repeated very widely and not evidenced. Recorded because the story is itself part of the culture, not because it happened.
The one load-bearing feature is a citrus character conventionally attributed to bergamot, and everything else varies. The origin story attaching the name to a nineteenth-century British statesman circulates universally in several mutually incompatible versions, none of which TeaHQ has found substantiated, and it is best reported as a widely repeated commercial narrative rather than as history. The product range beneath the name is enormous. Versions exist made with bergamot oil, with a nature-derived flavouring preparation and with synthetic material, at every price point, and the ingredient list distinguishes them only partially. Because the citrus character is an oil applied to finished leaf rather than an aroma absorbed from a living flower, Earl Grey is a flavoured tea in every version, and the differences between them are differences of flavouring quality and dose rather than of production category. Variants proliferate: creams, blues with added cornflower, greens, smoked versions and doubles, all of which are further decisions rather than defined styles. For a buyer the useful questions are what the base is, whether the flavouring names its source, and whether the seller describes the base at all — that last being unusual and the clearest signal that the product is more than a delivery vehicle.
The breakfast blends, and what the national names mean
English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast and Scottish Breakfast are style descriptors rather than origin statements, and the leaf inside may come from several countries, none of which is the one in the name. The rough conventions are that the three run in increasing order of strength and maltiness, with Irish and Scottish versions typically weighted more heavily towards Assam, and the conventions are loose enough that a given seller’s Irish Breakfast may be lighter than another’s English. What all of them are built to do is take milk, which is the design constraint that explains the base selection: colour, body and briskness that remain recognisable through a substantial addition of dairy, which is what a strong Assam or a CTC component supplies and what a delicate orthodox tea cannot. A blend of this kind is a specification rather than a recipe — the blender assembles it from whatever lots meet the target at an acceptable price that month, adjusting continuously as crops and prices move, so that the customer never notices. That is a genuine feat of skill and it is the opposite of traceability, which is why asking such a product where its leaf came from is asking a question it was designed not to have a stable answer to.
Chai, and the word doing double duty
The word means tea in a great many languages, so a product sold as chai in English-speaking markets is naming a preparation rather than a tea: a strong black base, a spice mixture, and traditionally milk and sugar, prepared by simmering rather than steeping. There is no fixed spice recipe and there never was — the mixtures vary by household, by region and by vendor, and cardamom, ginger, cinnamon or cassia, clove, black pepper and fennel appear in different combinations and proportions. Two things follow for a buyer. The ingredient list is unusually informative here, because the descending order tells you whether you are buying a tea with spices or a spice blend with tea in it, and a product whose first ingredient is cinnamon is the latter. And the format matters: whole spices keep well and ground ones do not, so a pre-ground masala blend has a much shorter useful life than one with whole cardamom pods, and a chai concentrate or syrup is a third product again. The base is almost always a CTC or a strong broken grade, correctly, because the tea has to stand up to spices and dairy.
The other recurring names
Russian Caravan is a blend style, usually black, frequently including a smoked component, whose name refers to an overland trade route and whose composition varies completely between sellers. Afternoon blends name a lighter target, sometimes with a Darjeeling or Ceylon weighting, and are the vaguest of the group. Lady Grey and its relatives are Earl Grey variants with additional citrus or floral material. Jasmine tea sits outside this list entirely because it is a scented tea rather than a blend, and the distinction matters: the aroma is in the leaf rather than assembled around it. And a great many house blends carry a shop’s own name and a description, which is the most honest version of the whole category — a named product that makes no claim to be a style anybody else is also making. The general reading habit is simple. Where a name evokes a place, a person or a history, it is naming a style and making no origin claim, and the actual origin statement is elsewhere on the pack, usually in small print, frequently saying only where the tea was blended and packed.
How to buy a blend well
Judge it against its job rather than against a single-origin tea, because a blend is built to hold a cup steady while its inputs move and that is a different achievement from expressing a place. Read the ingredient list first, since it settles the scented-against-flavoured question, tells you whether visible botanicals are a real part of the product or a garnish, and reveals when a fruit or spice blend is mostly something other than what the picture shows. Compare within a name rather than across names, since three Earl Greys side by side teach a great deal about flavouring quality and an Earl Grey against a Keemun teaches only that they are different. Expect one infusion from a flavoured blend and buy accordingly, since the flavouring front-loads by construction. And buy from sellers whose turnover is quick, since flavoured products fade faster than their base and almost nobody prints the date a tea was blended. None of this makes blends the poor relation. Some of the most widely admired tea products in the world are blends, and buying one knowingly is the whole of the recommendation.