How to Make a London Fog, and the One We Make Instead

A London Fog is Earl Grey, steamed milk, and vanilla. It is not from London. The best-known account puts it in Vancouver.

A London Fog is Earl Grey tea, steamed milk, and vanilla. That is the entire drink. The account most often repeated puts its invention in a café on Fourth Avenue in Vancouver, sometime in the mid-1990s.

The drink is from Vancouver

As Mary Loria tells it, she was off coffee at the time and wanted something a café could still make her. She ordered Earl Grey with steamed skim milk and no water, then added vanilla sugar at the condiment station. It spread through the city by word of mouth, and when she started seeing it on menus she did not recognize it as hers.

None of the accounts explains the name. The woman most often credited with inventing it cannot tell you where it came from.

Other claims exist. Island Coffeehouse in Langley, Washington claims it got there first, though its version was made with peppermint rather than Earl Grey. Murchie's, the British Columbia tea blender that opened in 1894, gets the credit in Vancouver often enough that it turns up as local fact. None of it is settled.

How to make the classic

For one 300ml mug:

2 teaspoons loose Earl Grey, or 2 bags
150ml just-boiled water
150ml milk
vanilla syrup or vanilla sugar, to taste

Steep the tea in that small amount of water for four to five minutes, so it comes out stronger than you would drink it plain. Sweeten it while it is hot. Steam the milk, or heat it and froth it, and pour it in.

The short, strong brew is the part people skip. Half your mug is about to become milk, so a normally brewed cup arrives at the table tasting like warm milk with an idea of tea in it.

The one we make instead

A London Fog adds vanilla to a black tea. Dusk already has it.

The panel reads apple, cinnamon, lavender, chamomile, Amazonian vanilla, Cusco black tea, and lemon balm. Two of the things a café adds by hand, vanilla and lavender, are already in the blend. It needs no syrup, and we call the result the Amazon Fog.

The base is Cusco black tea, so it behaves like one. It takes milk, and it turns tannic if you push the steep. The apple and cinnamon land it somewhere near spiced cider. The tasting notes for the plain cup are spiced and woody, with honey and floral notes, medium body and a long finish.

Dusk brewed plain in a clear double-wall glass cup with an amber handle, beside a small pile of dry Dusk leaf on a white surface in hard sunlight — Dusk brewed plain, before any milk goes in.

Where the two drinks part company is bergamot. A London Fog is built on Earl Grey, and Earl Grey is black tea scented with bergamot, a citrus oil that arrives sharp and perfumed at the front of the cup. Dusk has no bergamot in it. The aromatic work is done by apple and cinnamon instead, so the same three things, black tea and milk and vanilla, land nearer spiced cider than citrus.

The vanilla is the other difference, and it is the one worth tasting for. A café adds vanilla as syrup, which means it arrives sweetened. Dusk is blended with Amazonian vanilla, so it comes through with no sugar attached to it.

The Amazon Fog

For one 300ml mug:

8g Dusk, about a heaped tablespoon and a half
200ml just-boiled water
100ml milk

Steep the 8g in 200ml for six minutes and strain. Steam or heat the milk and pour it in.

That is two parts tea to one part milk, and the ratio is the one place we break from the classic. Bergamot can hold its own in a half-milk mug; Dusk's apple and vanilla are quieter, and equal parts milk buries them. The strong steep is still the tea latte rule at work, the same one behind brewing Gather at double strength before it goes over ice.

Taste it before you sweeten it. There is enough apple and vanilla in the blend that most cups do not need sugar. If yours does, use chancaca, the Peruvian cane sugar, melted in a little warm water first.

Iced, and by the jug

For an iced one, brew the same 8g concentrate hot, let it cool, and pour it over ice with cold milk.

For a jug, the cold brew spec is one 50g pouch to about six cups of cold water, overnight in the fridge. Dusk holds up to twelve hours and comes out drinking like cold spiced apple. Pour it over ice and add cold milk to the glass.

On the caffeine

Dusk has low caffeine, from the Cusco black tea, well below a straight cup. If you are caffeine-sensitive, Rooted and Gather are the caffeine-free cups.

What is in the pouch

Dusk is 8g to a 300ml mug, six to eight minutes when you are drinking it plain, and about 25 cups to a pouch. Blended in Peru. Ingredients include Peruvian and globally sourced botanicals. The full method for every blend is on the brewing guide.

All four Menjunjes blends brewed in clear glass cups beside their dry loose leaf, with a glass teapot, on a white surface under striped sunlight — All four blends, brewed and dry.

If you would rather try the range before you commit to one, the Discovery Box holds all four with a pour card for each.

Sources

Origin account: Mary Loria, as reported by Vancouver Is Awesome and Food Republic. Competing claims (Island Coffeehouse, Langley, Washington; Murchie's Tea and Coffee, British Columbia) as reported by Imbibe Magazine, which describes the drink's history as unsettled. Brewing doses and tasting notes: Menjunjes supplier panel and kitchen retests.

Menjunjes

Written by Menjunjes