About Drury Teas
The Drury Tea & Coffee Company, established in 1936, is a family-run specialist supplier of tea and coffee to the wholesale and consumer markets. Based in London, but operating both nationally and internationally, the Company blends tea from its headquarters from the Royal Arsenal development by the River Thames.
The Company has a rich family history, inextricably entwined with London, it’s Anglo-Italian expatriate population and the coffee shops and cafés they established. The story starts in the late 1920’s when three Olmi brothers arrived in London. Soon, their entrepreneurial spirit lead them to start their own business and so in early 1936 they began blending and packing tea. For a short while they rented premises opposite the Windmill Theater in Soho, before settling in Drury Lane, where they opened retail premises on the ground floor, whilst upstairs blending tea on a customized zinc floor with large wooden shovels.
At the close of the Second World War, the Company was renamed the Drury Tea & Coffee Company after the street where it was located and to better reflect its market aspirations.
Loose Leaf Tea
The very first goods they produced were loose-leaf tea blends, mixed by hand with wooden shovels in their premises in Great Windmill Street. The leaf teas sold today may be different but they share the same attributes of those blends from many years ago, namely, the finest quality teas from the World’s best estates, picked at the peak of their quality and then processed with infinite care.
There is still something about loose leaf tea that evokes a bygone age. Long since overtaken by the ubiquitous teabag, the ritual of making tea with fresh tea leaves brewed in a teapot and served with hot water, milk and a tea strainer is somehow quintessentially British. Ritual apart, there are certain teas – usually top quality leaves – that can never be ‘bagged’. Drury has these in its portfolio and plenty more choice besides. Some of the teas are seasonally available and some are so rare we perhaps only have them for a short period and in small quantities.
The full tea selection includes black, green and white teas, semi-fermented teas, tisanes and fruit infusions. All our loose leaf teas are carefully selected, and where appropriate, blended by the London based in-house team of tea experts, whose considerable skill produces balanced blends to deliver flavor, strength and color.
Pyramid Tea Bags
Why are pyramid bags the most important product in the Drury Tea portfolio? It’s perhaps the quality of large leaf tea and the convenience of teabags that makes them so popular, opening up the flavor of real tea to a whole new audience.
The pyramid teabags are made from biodegradable cornstarch gauze. This fine mesh allows the true flavor of the tea to shine through as the brewed liquor can freely pass through the material. Drury Pyramids are packed in window cartons of 15. Designed with a blue
‘family’ feel, each of the varieties is differentiated by an Art
Deco-style illustration relevant to the respective tea type. The design
evokes the mood of the thirties when The Drury Tea & Coffee Company
was founded. Our presentation ranges of pyramid teabag
caddies and gift packs offer an excellent retail sales opportunity.
We at Harrowgate Fine Foods are delighted to be able to represent this famous family company from England and offer their fine teas in the United States of America for the first time.
