Fortnum & Mason – Queen Anne Blend and Countess Grey Tea
These Fortnum & Mason teas were sent to me by friend and fellow tea fancier, Hannah, and quite frankly, I feel like I have moved into more refined tea-drinking circles. I’d never had a Fortnum & Mason tea before and now I have. I am drinking tea from the world-famous purveyor of foodstuffs to both the fancy and the schmancy.
Fortnum & Mason have been in business since 1707 (the year after teamonger Thomas Twining also set up business in London) and describe themselves as the “World’s Most Famous Cornershop”. They lay claim to inventing the scotch egg in 1738 and being the first ever stockists of Heinz Baked Beans in 1886.
And they also sell tea because of course, they do. And the two teas I’ve been sent are Queen Anne Blend and Countess Grey.
Queen Anne Blend
In the ingredients list on the website, the only ingredient listed for Queen Anne blend is “tea” which initially didn’t give me much clue as to why this blend was so bloody amazing (and it is bloody amazing, I can tell you). I did try to take a stab at how it managed to combine robustness and delicacy so perfectly. I thought it might be either Ceylon-based or a clever combination of, say, the robustness of Assam and the delicacy of Darjeeling. But honestly, who am I kidding? It might be a combination of teas from Patagonia and Ipswich for all I knew.
Happily, the online description of the tea gives us more information. Queen Anne blend is a blend of TGFOP Assam and Ceylon FBOP teas so I was kind of right. And you know all those bunches of letters? That explains why this tea is so bloody good.
TGFOP stands for Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. FBOP is Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe. I went into quite a bit of detail about tea leaf grades in my Whittard Assam review if you want to learn more. But suffice it to say, this is exceptionally good quality tea to be bunging in a tea bag. I bet their loose-leaf version is even better.
Countess Grey
Does a countess outrank a lady? Kinda. ‘Lady’ is used as an honorific for all kinds of noblewomen including marchionesses, countesses, viscountesses or baronesses, so a countess is a lady but a lady isn’t necessarily a countess. The wife of an earl is correctly addressed as a countess which seems a bit wonky and is largely down to the fact that ‘Earless’ isn’t a word. (Which is probably a good thing because “earl-ess” just looks like “ear-less” when you write it.)
But on to the tea. The ingredients list for Countess Grey lists, orange flavouring pretty high up in the pecking order. It’s the second ingredient after tea and is followed by bergamot flavouring and orange peel.
I read the ingredients before I drink the tea and I kind of wish I hadn’t because I think it coloured (or, indeed, flavoured) my opinion. I found the whole thing rather reminiscent of effervescent, orange-flavoured vitamin tablets. It is very, very orangey and I feel like it was orange in a different way from an actual orange. But like I say, I might have been biased.
Weirdly the ingredients listed for Countess Grey loose leaf are different and consist of “tea, flavourings and marigold flowers”. You don’t even get any orange peel with that one.
I only had one bag of this tea for review purposes and I’m tempted to purchase some more just so I can get a better handle on whether or not I liked it. I’d really like to do a side-by-side taste comparison with Twinings Lady Grey because I think I like Lady Grey more, but I’d like to check. Fortnum & Mason is posher (i.e. more expensive) than Twinings. So surely that must count for something?
Today’s featured books are The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and Matilda: Wife of the Conqueror, First Queen of England by Tracy Borman (not the right queen for Queen Anne blend, obviously, but still a queen).
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