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Teapigs describe this tea as “Earl Grey with attitude“. It’s for people who like their Earl Grey to come with oomph and wallop apparently. I don’t think I’m opposed to oomph and wallop per se. They both seem like admirable characteristics for a cup of tea.
This is a nice sturdy beverage. It’s dark and robust flavour make for a satisfying brew. It could be the perfect way to start the day after a long night sleep or, indeed, after an afternoon nap (which seems to be a thing I’m really into these days). It’s just that the hefty Assam and Rwandan teas in here do tend to swamp the bergamot somewhat. This doesn’t, to me, taste like a proper cup of Earl Grey.
But what is a proper cup of Earl Grey anyway? My recent tea research has uncovered some pretty startling revelations about the history of Earl Grey tea. Hold on to your headgear people, I am about to drop a bergamot-based-brew bombshell on you.
I always thought that Twinings produced the first Earl Grey tea in the UK. I have confidently stated that here on this blog on more than one occasion. To be fair, that’s what Twinings told me, and like a fool, I believed them. Their website informs us “it all started in 1831 with Richard Twining who created this iconic blend at the request of Prime Minister Charles Grey. He loved this tea and put his name on it.”
It turns out that this is, in all probability, a big fat fib and that the actual Earl Grey (1764–1845) had bugger all to do with it. The Oxford English Dictionary carried out quite a substantial investigation in 2012 into the origins of Earl Grey. There is no mention of an Earl Grey tea mixture to be found any time before 1891 (more than forty years after the Earl’s death) and no reference to it containing bergamot until much later.
In fact, during the second Earl Grey’s lifetime, adding bergamot to tea was considered a sneaky underhanded sort of thing to do. Teamongers would do it to disguise the taste of poor quality tea. In 1837, Brocksop & Company were in trouble with the law for doing just that. There are references to plain ‘Grey’s tea’ without any ducal honorifics from 1854 onwards. The OED and The Foods of England project (who seem to be all over this matter) reckon that this is the name of the teamonger who produced it, rather than any kind of Prime Minister-based celebrity endorsement.
So there you go. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to think now.
It’s all very well saying that Teapigs’ Strong Earl Grey doesn’t taste like proper Earl Grey. But now that everything I thought I knew about Earl Grey has been thrown up in the air, there’s no reason to assume that this isn’t the classic Earl Grey recipe anyway. Teapigs was established in 2006, 170 years after Charles, Earl Grey’s stint as prime minister But you know what? I reckon they can claim to be the originators of Earl Grey if they want to. Everyone else is.
Today’s featured book is Grey by E L. James, the tale of billionaire and self-absorbed annoying twatface Christian Grey, who famously gave his name to this black tea and bergamot tea blend. (If Twinings can make up a load of bullshit about the original origin of Earl Grey, then so can I.)
