Clipper – English Breakfast
Clipper English Breakfast Tea is not good. I mean, it’s good in the sense that it’s organic, Fairtrade, and takes the number one spot in The Good Shopping Guide’s Ethical Comparison Ratings Table for tea.
But it tastes horrible.
We’ll address the ethical side of things in a minute because first, I’m going to focus on the taste. It gives me no pleasure to say it – I do want to support good companies doing good things – but Clipper tastes both bitter and insipid and has no actual taste of tea.
I compared it side by side to cups of Yawn’s Ya Brews Mashin (because that’s the current Breakfast blend on the tea shelf) and a PG Tips teabag, which I half-inched from Premier Inn for the express purpose of running tea comparisons.
Yawn’s brew was far smoother and tastier and, most importantly, tasted like it came from a Camelia sinensis plant. (And bear in mind that Ya Brews Mashin only got three stars, so I wasn’t even pitching Clipper against a 5-star effort like Bird & Blend’s Great British Cuppa or Good & Proper’s Assam.)
I thought that at least the PG Tips would make Clipper tea look good by comparison. (I am quite vehement in my dislike of Britain’s top-selling tea blend.) But, no. There was absolutely nothing to choose between the two of them, taste-wise.
So, let’s put flavour aside for one moment and look at ethics instead. Clipper has clearly been doing a lot of the right things since before it was cool, having started the business in 1984. The Good Shopping Guide puts Clipper right at the top of its list of ethical tea companies. It commends them for their Soil Association and Fairtrade Foundation certifications, as well as their commitment to corporate social responsibility and ethical innovation. And while Ethical Consumer, another ethical tea list compiler, doesn’t rate them quite as highly, they still appear higher on the list than any other tea brands I’ve reviewed.
And honestly, that’s really, really good. I’m all for this sort of thing. But the problem with lists like these is that they don’t include every teamonger out there. OK, these lists have shown that I should probably re-evaluate my relationship with Twinings, but on the whole, I think I’m a pretty ethical tea consumer.
It’s not all that straightforward, though. Take “fairtrade”. A lot of teas are fairly traded but don’t carry Fairtrade certifications. Bird & Blend, a non-Fairtrade company that pays above the Fairtrade minimum price for all its teas, provides an in-depth explanation of the problems of Fairtrade on its website. Many small farmers cannot accommodate the lengthy accreditation process and joining fee involved in becoming Fairtrade certified. This is presumably why other TeaFancier favourites, Curious Tea and Comins, also don’t carry accreditation labels. Yet you only need to read the description of any of their teas to know how involved they are with the people who produce their high-quality single-estate products. Both these companies go way beyond Good Shopping Guide’s requirement that a tea company supplies a list of producers. They’ve sat down and drunk tea with them. They probably know their kids’ names.
Another thing that Good Shopping Guide and Ethical Consumer take into consideration when compiling their tea lists is the antics of a tea brand’s parent company. Take Tetley and Teapigs, for example. They’re owned by the international multiconglomerate Tata Group, which also manufactures weapons. Now, admittedly, I haven’t done extensive research into this, but I’m pretty sure that Sasha from SaChasi, and Giles and Mark from Two Spoons don’t sell missile launchers on the side.
Yes, I have bought and reviewed Teapigs tea in the past, and now I feel a bit weird about it. This research has been very informative. What I’ve learnt is that I could be doing more when it comes to ensuring that my tea brands are ethical. This is, after all, the one item on my shopping list where I’m prepared to pay a lot more than the Sainsbury’s Basics level of food products that comprise a lot of what I buy. I want tea that is kind to the environment, kind to people, and generally makes the world a nicer, happier place. Importantly – and this is where Clipper and I are going to have to part company – I also want it to taste good.
Today’s book pairing is Red Sauce, Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake. Because it’s about breakfast.
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