Co-op – Earl Grey
When I was sixteen, I used to frequent a pub called The Cricketers. It was a popular choice for students at my sixth form college, partly because all the local bands used to play there on Friday nights but mostly because the Landlord had a rather relaxed attitude about serving liquor to people under the legal drinking age.
The pub itself is no more. Maybe having a customer base of teenagers who smuggled their own drinks in to save money wasn’t the best business model. Who knows? (And when I say ‘teenagers’, I mean specifically me. I used to smuggle my own drinks in.)
The building remains, though. For a while, it was a very nice Chinese restaurant and now it’s a Co-op supermarket. It is, in fact, the self-same Co-op supermarket from which I purchased this Earl Grey tea. Which is the only reason I brought it up.
I am as, you already know, a regular and enthusiastic drinker of Earl Grey. My Earl Grey index is calibrated on Twinings Earl Grey. Twinings is the green bit of the Earl Grey litmus paper, with all other Earls Grey being worse or better. (Although, given that litmus paper doesn’t go from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ – unless you have strong feelings about acid and alkaline – this possibly wasn’t the best analogy.)
I like Co-op as a supermarket because as a vegan, organic, fairtrade hippy type I feel well-catered for by the left-leaning Co-operative Group who are all about the ethics and shizzle. But sadly, their Earl Grey tea is not everything I dreamed of in a black tea and bergamot blend.
It’s fine. It’s not actively unpleasant. But it isn’t as nice as Twinings and it certainly doesn’t come close to scaling the heights of, say, Tea Keepers Earl Grey. (Yes, my litmus paper apparently has ‘heights’ too, now. Just go with it.)
And, although the tea box tells me that this tea is fairtrade, it’s not providing me with an awful lot of other information. The ingredients are black tea and flavouring. There’s no indication of where this tea has been grown, which would have been nice to know.
So, I shall continue to shop at Co-op for essentials like aquafaba, silken tofu and vegan fudge, but I shall be sourcing my tea elsewhere. But, you’ll be pleased to know, at least I’ve stopped smuggling my own drinks into the premises.
Today’s featured book is The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Since discovering that Charles Dickens started writing when Earl Grey was prime minister, I shall likely be using Dickens’ books a lot for Earl Grey tea reviews.
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