Lidl – Earl Grey
Lidl Supermarket is my supermarket of choice when it comes to doing my weekly shop. It used to be Aldi but then they built a new Lidl in Guildford which had better parking than Aldi AND a toilet, so I changed my allegiance pretty smartish. I like lots of their products. (I can heartily recommend their oatcakes and vegan choc ices, for example.) But it only recently occurred to me to give Lidl tea a go. I decided to start with Lidl Earl Grey because I’m very fond of a bergamot-based brew.
Quick Note About The Ethics of Lidl
One of the reasons I shop at Lidl is because I always consider them one of the more ethical of the leading supermarkets. Waitrose and Lidl came joint first in a Which? report of supermarkets’ eco-friendliness. And although Ethical Consumer only gives Lidl a score of 3.5 out of 20, that actually compares pretty favourably with other major supermarkets. Waitrose and Co-Op rank slightly higher with 4.5 and 4 respectively. Sainsbury’s and Asda only get 2 points apiece and Tesco scores a paltry 0.5 out of 20. The main takeaway here, I guess, is that everybody could be doing a lot more.
Lidl Earl Grey, it turns out, is an utterly forgettable tea. Every cup of it completely failed to make any impact. It wasn’t unpleasant but there was nothing about it that was exciting or memorable. I decided we need to bring some Actual Science (note: not actual science) into this and do a side-by-side taste test with Twinings Earl Grey.
Twinings is my go-to control Earl Grey in these circumstances. It’s not the best Earl Grey out there. I thought it was the best when I originally reviewed it last year but I’ve found nicer Earls Grey since then. It does however provide a solid Earl Grey benchmark against which I can measure other brands. Plus I always have it in the house so that’s handy.
When it came to a Lidl and Twinings head-to-head comparison, there was one clear winner. Poor, wan, forgettable Lidl Earl Grey had nothing on Twinings which provides a full-on bergamot-y tea-y experience. Lidl’s version only tastes of tea in a generic brown-warm-liquid kind of way whereas Twinings does actually taste like something that was harvested from a tea bush. Lidl’s bergamot flavouring efforts are pretty lacklustre too.
Lidl Earl Grey clearly wants to be Twinings. Lidl are always fabulously cheeky when it comes to ripping off other brands, and they have shamelessly copied Twinings’ purple swirly design. They’ve even included a purple top hat on the box just to make it even more obvious. Sadly, they didn’t do such a good job when it came to copying the taste of the tea.
I did want to like Lidl Earl Grey. It costs 1.9p per teabag compared to 7p per teabag for a comparably sized box of Twinings. Twinings Earl Grey is almost four times the price of Lidl’s. If it had been acceptably pleasant, that would have been quite the saving for the Tea Fancier household.
Twinings is more than four times nicer though. It’s at least 17 times nicer. Maybe even 18. The remaining Lidl Earl Grey teabags will be stored away just in case there’s some catastrophic world tea shortage or a zombie invasion. If either of those things happen, I might just be persuaded to give it another go.
Today’s featured book is Tea and Tea Drinking by Claire Masset.
Lidl delux earl grey tea is absolutely awful dreadful 😫 there’s no taste of bergamot it’s disgusting 😢 😔
It is abhorrent that you are reviewing tea and putting milk in Earl Grey.
Earl Grey is flavoured with bergamot, its supposed to be served with a slice of lemon and at a push a spoon of honey, no milk.