Back in Olney: A Buckinghamshire Tea Talk and Bucks Blend

Back in Olney (and Saying It Properly This Time)

There’s a bench in the little garden outside Olney library, and before our talk last week I sat on it with my notes, gathering my thoughts and practising one word under my breath.

Oh-nee.

Not Ol-nee. The first time we came to talk to the Friends of the Library, some years ago, we pronounced the L. Confidently, and more than once. Nobody corrected us on the day (Olney is far too polite for that), but we found out afterwards and have winced about it ever since.

So if you’ve ever wondered how to pronounce Olney, learn from our mistake. The L stays silent.

Being invited back was a lovely surprise. It’s about the nicest compliment a tea talk can get, because it means we didn’t send anyone to sleep the first time, or at least not everyone.

A communal slurp

We brewed up our Earl Grey, served without milk, and everyone had a slurp together. (Tasters slurp. It spreads the tea right across your palate, and it’s the one time making a noise at the table is positively encouraged.) Then we passed round some bergamot peel.

You could see the penny drop. Very few people know what bergamot actually is: a knobbly little citrus fruit, somewhere between a lemon and an orange, and far too sour to eat. Smell the peel, sip the tea, and suddenly the flavour has a source. The whole blend comes to life.

One lady had brought along a sample of a tea she loved but could no longer find. Cue a bit of tea detective work. The leaf was distinctive, and she thought her son had picked it up in London. Between those two clues we tracked it down to Mayfair Breakfast Tea from the Naked Larder in Herne Hill. (Not one of ours, but we’d much rather someone drinks the tea they love than one they don’t.)

A small town, a big song and a cup of tea

Olney has a claim to fame that surprises most visitors. Amazing Grace was written here by the town’s curate, John Newton, and published in the Olney Hymns, a collection he put together with the poet William Cowper.

Cowper has a tea connection of his own. In The Task, written while he lived in Olney, he describes settling in for the evening with the urn bubbling away and “the cups, that cheer but not inebriate”. The Victorians took that line to heart and quoted it about tea for the next hundred years. So one small market town in Buckinghamshire gave the world a hymn sung everywhere and one of the best-loved lines about tea in English. I like that very much.

Buckinghamshire tea, from Buckinghamshire

Which brings me, rather neatly, to Bucks Blend. We’re a Buckinghamshire tea company, based at the other end of the county, and Bucks Blend is our local English Breakfast style tea, named for the place we live and work. It’s the strongest in our range, because it carries the most Assam, which gives it that malty backbone that stands up happily to milk. Then there’s a sprinkling of Darjeeling, often called the champagne of teas. Which seems about right for a county with a reputation for being a little bit posh. (We couldn’t possibly comment.)

Try it for yourself

If you’ve never tried Bucks Blend, make a proper pot of it this weekend, add milk if that’s your way, and sit somewhere quiet (a garden bench is ideal). And if you happen to be in Olney, you’ll know exactly how to say where you’re drinking it.