Tea with (Soy) Milk

Being raised British, I've always drank (drunk?) black tea with milk.

The standard British tea is a fairly cheap mass-market powdered black tea, common brands being PG Tips, Tetley, and Yorkshire tea. It usually produces a strong, bitter taste, and is ready after just a few seconds of brewing. Here in Japan the equivalent is probably Day & Day, which is pretty decent. Even Lipton is not bad (unlike the European Lipton which generally requries two bags/cup to satisfy British tastes).

Tea is really an affordable luxury. It feels expensive to buy "good" tea compared to supermarket tea, but even expensive tea still works out at a small fraction per cup of what you'd pay in a cafe. Nowadays my fallback teabag tea is Ahmad English Tea No. 1 (which I discovered interestingly enough when visiting the former British consulate in Hakodate). But really I usually buy whatever loose black tea looks interesting, and brew it with the ever-convenient お茶パック "tea packs" that supermarkets sell here (probably with green tea in mind, but it works well for my purposes, too!). My favourite is actually loose tea from Yunnan province in China (not the fermented pu-erh), although this is surprisingly difficult to get hold of in Japan. The only times I've found it, it's been imported via European companies like Fortnum and Mason or Mariage Frères.

For the last decade, I've been cautioned about my cholesterol levels, and one of the ways to lower LDL cholesterol is to reduce intake of saturated fats, of which milk is a significant source. Originally I was drinking low fat milk, but this is not as tasty as semi-skimmed for tea. I think you need the creaminess to offset the bitterness of black tea, and it's the fat that helps that. But, this being Japan, soy milk is readily available in various styles (although interestingly, the soy beans seem to come from North America). For years now, I've been using unsweetened soy milk in my tea, and now I really love it! I actually prefer it to milk - which always tastes a bit sweet to me now. Soy milk works well with black tea because it offsets the bitterness, but it's a little astringent itself so makes the tea taste sharper than if it had milk added, while still balancing the bitterness.

Combine a strong black tea with a drop of soy milk and serve it up in a local Arita-yaki or perhaps a Cornishware mug, and you've found my little affordable daily luxury and great source of happiness.