Kenya Bold is camping tea. It’s marching tea. It’s a tea that can be a stand-in for food, if you’re desperate and willing.
If you know me, you are expecting me to use this as a platform to launch into stories of my beloved time in East Africa. But instead I will regale you of tales of the North Island of Aotearoa.
When I lived in Hamilton in the mid-2010s, Casey was to our crew what Red was to Shawshank State Prison. You need a calibrated torque wrench? He’s got three in his boot. Running a disastrous Saturday night party featuring a chilly paddling pool? Casey’s got a pool heater in his garage.
And Casey could do things to a pot of Kenya Bold that I did not think possible. “You guys go scope out the campsite,” he’d say. “I’ll put on a pot of tea.”
What we’d come back to, mere minutes later, would be a tea so black, so thick, that unsettled souls would line up to take residence in any cup you left too long untouched.
I don’t believe anyone ever watched Casey make his famous Kenya Bold soup, but I have to speculate that perhaps he boiled the pot with the bags already in it, and left it boiling for some time. Perhaps bonus bags were added at some point. Possibly the legs of his wee gas cooker formed some kind of pentagram.
But whenever interrogated on how he managed to brew such a concoction, he’d just say “Details, details, don’t worry about the details,” or “I dunno what to tell you man, I just do it the normal way.”
Kenya Bold is actually a blend of Kenyan and Ceylon tea, presumably to tart up the fact that this is fairly low-quality Kenyan tea. Straight Kenya tea may not feature much in Kiwi tea boxes, but it is an international powerhouse, with only China and India beating it on export volume. Kenya produces high-quality tea, but that’s not what Bell is buying. Standard-grade Kenyan is a good, reliable “base” tea and probably features in most English Breakfast blends you’ve tried.
If you’re hiking, sip on boiling hot, straight-out-of-the-pot Kenya Bold without milk for a strong wake-up call. If you’re in civilisation, you’re going to want this one with a good slug of the white stuff to avoid overwhelming your delicate sensibilities. That being said, this is a decent tea. Strong flavour, inoffensive, and containing a subtle hint of problematic masculinity, whether that’s to your taste or no.
