This quality Chinese tea is flavoured with Blackcurrant berries (giving it a taste not unlike hot Ribena) and heather flowers. Dried heather flowers have long been used as a substitute for tea and ‘moorland tea’ was a favourite of Robert Burns. Heather shoots have also been used as a substitute for hops to flavour beer.
The Picts in Shetland it is said, made an intoxicating decoction from just heather flowers. The recipe was lost after the Norsemen massacred everyone except a father and his son. Both refused to reveal the secret but after torture, the old man declared he would teach them but only if the killed his son first. Once dead, the father triumphantly declared he had been unsure of his son’s endurance but nothing could now make him give it up, so it died with him.
