The Undrinkable Disappointment That Is Aldi Biscuit Teas

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Aldi Diplomat Biscuit Tea – Tastes Like Biscuits, Tastes Like Salted Caramel, Tastes Like Jaffa

Aldi have recently launched a set of Biscuit Teas in their Diplomat range. There’s “Tastes like Biscuits”, “Tastes like Salted Caramel” and “Tastes like Jaffa”. And they’re not good. It pains me to say it but there it is.

I like Aldi. It’s my regular supermarket. They do some good quality own-brand products and I respect the bare-faced cheekery of the blatant brand rip-offs. (Its biscuit tea packaging is a shameless carbon copy of Yorkshire Tea’s Biscuit Brew, and it doesn’t care who knows it.)

I was all up for an affordable set of biscuit brews I could pick up with my weekly shop, but sadly it’s not to be. Because these taste awful.

The main problem here seems to be that Aldi have underestimated the importance of tea in a tea blend. The tea leaves shouldn’t just be there to make the drink the right colour, you know Aldi. With top-quality biscuit blends such as one might purchase from SaChasi or Birdhouse, a flavourful base does a lot of the heavy lifting. Whereas with Aldi’s Diplomat Biscuit Tea range, the only thing that tea seems to be bringing to the party is being, well, brown.

Jaffa biscuit tea is simultaneously both the best and worst of the three teas on offer. There is quite a nice orangey hit when you take the first few sips this makes it all the more disappointing when there’s no follow-through. There’s no satisfying chocolatiness, the black tea might as well have not shown up ,and even the orangeness disappears after a while.

It’s odd because Jaffa – unlike the Biscuit and Salted Caramel blends – does have proper ingredients. There’s cocoa shells, cocoa beans and orange peel in here as well as liquorice and chicory root. God knows how they managed to screw up so royally. The fact that they made an effort and still failed makes this one the most disappointing of the bunch.

‘Tastes Like Biscuits’ comprises just black tea and flavourings. It tastes like synthetically-produced burnt toast. Salted Caramel just tastes like the biscuit one with some sugar in it.

I knew I wasn’t going to get the Best Tea Ever Of All Time when I put these tea blends in my shopping trolley. But honestly I didn’t expect them to be quite so bloody awful. I gave Yorkshire Tea’s biscuit blend a fairly lacklustre review recently, but I still managed to cheerfully polish off the box. I drank two cups of each of these Aldi teas for the purposes of the review and even that was a struggle.

The teas I used for the photos were chucked away undrunk. I wasn’t putting myself through that again. I hope that any Aldi shoppers who buy this tea, and find them as disappointing as I did, don’t write off the whole concept of biscuit-themed tea as a terrible idea that never should have happened.

There is a whole biscuit barrelful of Jaffa Cake, chocolate digestive and custard cream-inspired teas out there. Ones that have been made by people who actually know what they’re doing.

Today’s featured book is Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Although times would have to be very hard indeed for me to consider giving these teas another try.

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