Bird & Blend – Earl Grey Crème
So, Earl Grey Crème, we meet at last. It’s extraordinary that I haven’t had this tea before, given that Bird & Blend are one of my most favourite teamongers and Earl Grey is one of my most favourite teas.
For some reason, I have always held off buying Earl Grey Crème when making a Bird & Blend tea order. “You’ve got a sample teabag of it,” I’d tell myself. “You should try that first.” And then I didn’t try the sample teabag either.
I know what it was. I suspected I might really, really like it. (As we all know, Bird & Blend’s Great British Cuppa won the Tea Fancier Tea Cup Challenge in 2021, so they have form for that sort of thing.) And the problem with nice things is that it ruins you for not-quite-so-nice things.
I knew that if I liked Bird & Blend’s Earl Grey blend as much as I thought I would, then my regular Twining’s bergamot blend just wouldn’t cut it anymore.
Ah well, Tea Keepers have already kind of ruined Twinings for me by being approximately five million times better. It was time to break out the one solitary Bird & Blend Earl Grey Crème tea bag at Tea Fancier towers.
And I’m pleased to report that my tea-based precognitive powers are bang-on. Bird & Blend Earl Grey Crème is absolutely magnificent. It’s bergamotty, it’s vanilla-y, it’s got cornflowers in it (because Bird & Blend do love to pretty up their blends with flower petals at every opportunity), and it all works together beautifully.
Earl Grey Crème mostly comprises of Sri Lankan black tea. There are no hard and fast rules about what black tea is used in an Earl Grey blend. In this case, it performs an admirable base on which the other flavours can perform like the big show-offs they are.
I would have liked to do some side-by-side comparisons with this tea and other Earl Grey blends. How would it fare next to Tea Keepers Earl Grey and Vanilla, I wonder? Unfortunately, only having the one teabag meant that that wasn’t an option.
Maybe I need to buy a big sack of Bird & Blend Earl Grey Crème so I can compare it to every other kind of Earl Grey in the world. That does, to be fair, sound like exactly the sort of thing I would do.
Today’s featured book is Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens because ever since I discovered that Dickens and the second Earl Grey were contemporaries, I always pair the two Charleses together.
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I have just come across your delightful blog and must say I agree wholeheartedly with you that Earl Grey and Rose are some of the best teas ever and especially that Sainsburys Decaf (although it’s not available in our local stores right now!) is superior to Twinings. I look forward to trying some Tea Keepers. Can I recommend you try the Sainsburys limited edition Rose Infused Earl Grey too – hopefully you can get hold of a packet and it won’t be like the raspberry one and vanish without trace (although I can also confirm that I had a box and liked it too!)
Kind regards
Katy