Aldi introduced a range of biscuit teas last month, and reactions were mixed. By that, I mean that although I’m sure some people liked them, personally, I found them utterly horrible and undrinkable. (You can read my disappointment in full in my review here.)
It’s annoying because people unfamiliar with the concept of biscuit teas might have tried them and swiftly decided that biscuit-inspired blends were a terrible idea and that they wanted no further truck with them.
Well, I’m here in my capacity as the Tea Fancier to correct that misapprehension. When done right, a bakery-based tea is a thing of beauty, wonder, and low-calorie sweet treat indulgence.
Here are ten teas which are better than Aldi’s Biscuit, Salted Caramel and Jaffa Cake teas.
10. Yorkshire Tea – Biscuit Brew
This is not the best biscuit tea available, but it is certainly the most well-known and readily available. All the big supermarkets stock it. It is also considerably better than Aldi’s knock-off version, which is odd because Aldi versions of branded food-and-drinkstuffs are usually very good.
Biscuit Brew is a perfectly pleasant biscuity blend, particularly if you’re fonder of Yorkshire Tea than I am. When I first discovered this tea back in 2018, it knocked my socks off. I used to stockpile it in case it was only a limited-edition thing and its days were numbered. But that was long ago, and I have learned much about life – or at least tea – since then. While I still retain a fondness for Yorkshire Tea’s Biscuit Brew, I now know there’s a whole world of biscuit-inspired teas out there that do the job even better. However, Biscuit Brew is rather cheaper than the rest of the teas on this list, so it works well as a biscuit tea gateway drug. Once you’ve had a taste of the weirdy tea possibilities with Biscuit Brew and its sister Toast & Jam tea, you’re all set to step up your game.
9. Bird & Blend – Caramelised Biscuit
Bird & Blend appear a couple of times on the list because, really, this is the sort of thing that Bird & Blend do best. Established in 2012, with fourteen shops around the country, Bird & Blend have an impressive catalogue of teas inspired by things that are not tea, like jelly and ice cream, wedding cake and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Caramelised Biscuit is part of their new Biscuit Tea range, which also includes ginger nut and cookies and cream-inspired blends. (It also includes their Chocolate Digestive blend, but that one’s been around for ages and appears later in this list.) Inspired by hairdresser-favourite Lotus Biscoff, Caramelised Biscuit is a satisfying, rich, dark, Speculoosey drink. I do think it’s a bit too sweet, though. The added Stevia probably has a lot to do with that. You might think it would be impossible to produce a caramel-flavoured beverage that doesn’t taste sugary, but later teas on this list demonstrate that such things are entirely possible.
8. T2 – Lamington
OK, a Lamington is a cake rather than a biscuit, but it would be a shame to leave T2’s bakery range off the list. T2 is an Australian company who sadly shut down the UK side of their operation last year, but you can still order teas online via their international site if you don’t mind a hefty postage fee. This tea is a blend of black tea, raspberry pieces, cocoa, coconut and flavourings. T2, as a rule, use ‘flavourings’ rather than the more common ‘natural flavourings’ found in tea blends.
The difference between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ flavourings is not actually all that cut-and-dried. It certainly isn’t necessarily the case that ‘natural’ equals good, and all other types of flavourings are hellish Frankensteinian abominations. That said, T2’s teas do have a weird sort of artificiality to them. This tea tastes of cake, but it tastes more like an individual Mr Kipling-style wrapped cake from the supermarket than something your Granny might have baked for you. The same goes for their Hot Jam Brownie and Banana Bake teas but I quite like the cheerful in-your-face flavours. These are teas which refuse to take themselves seriously.
7. Birdhouse Tea Company – Custard Cream
This custard cream-inspired brew contains black tea, rooibos, vanilla and coconut. The coconut is an odd decision because it’s fairly strident here, making this tea more reminiscent of a coconut ring than a custard cream. This is fine by me as I would select a coconut ring ahead of a dull old custard cream in any teatime selection box you proffered in my direction.
Although it’s primarily a black tea blend, this tea also contains rooibos, the caffeine-free tea-equivalent grown exclusively in the Cederberg mountain region of South Africa. I have stuck to black tea-based brews in the compiling this list, but if – like me – you are a fan of rooibos-based teas, then you should check out some of the rooibos-based biscuity-type teas available. Rooibos has a cakey, biscuity vibe going on already, so it makes an excellent base for these sorts of teas.
6. Biscuit & Brew – Biscuit Brew
Biscuit & Brew is a very appropriately named tea company for this list. As well as selling teas online, it’s also a tea shop in Nottingham. Teas include Cherry Bakewell, Banana Fudge and Rhubarb & Custard. However, it’s their Biscuit Brew blend that interests us here. A blend of Sri Lankan black tea, Chinese Yunnan, cocoa shells, oat flowering tops and natural flavouring, it aims to recreate the taste of a chocolate digestive.
It’s not quite as chocolatey as I would like, but it is very, very biscuity and, therefore, vastly superior to Aldi’s efforts. Incidentally, when I say that I would like this tea to be more chocolatey, I mean I want it to be as chocolatey as an actual chocolate digestive. The chocolate digestive is not an overly chocolatey confection, I grant you. It’s not pretending to be a Marks & Spencer’s chocolate-covered shortbread round. With its thin just-enough layer of chocolate, a chocolate digestive is quite understated, and I respect that. It’s just that Biscuit & Brew Biscuit Brew is slightly more understated than that.
5. SaChasi – Salted Caramel Stroopwafel
This is the Salted Caramel tea that others wish they could be like. Obviously hugely superior to Aldi’s Salted Caramel nonsense, it also beats Bird & Blend’s efforts largely by achieving the seemingly impossible task of being a caramel tea that isn’t too sweet. This may be down to its baffling-sounding ingredients list, which contains – alongside Ceylon Orange Pekoe tea – chicory, dates, orange peel, carob, mesquite, lucuma, rosehip and sunflower petals.
I’m not sure what all the different ingredients are doing here – I’m not even sure what all of them are – but they combine to make an extraordinarily good tea that tastes uncannily like the Netherlands’ famous syrup waffles. SaChasi will appear later on the list, and frankly, I could have made a list comprising entirely of SaChasi teas. Their business strategy seems to involve walking through supermarket biscuit aisles, bakeries, patisseries and fancy chocolate shops and saying, “How can we make a tea out of that?”
4. Whittard – Dark Chocolate
Not a biscuit tea, but if you want a straight-up no-messing-about tea and chocolate blend, you really can’t go wrong with Whittard’s Dark Chocolate blend. With an ingredients list comprising just Indian and Indonesian black teas and a generous number of cocoa nibs, this tea encapsulates why chocolate and tea are such a very good match. The thing about chocolate tea, you understand, is it’s not that chocolatey. It is in no way equivalent to a steaming mug of hot chocolate or chomping on a bar of fruit and nut. If one were some kind of super healthy type (and trust me, I’m not one of those), one could suggest enjoying a cup of Whittard’s Dark Chocolate as a low-calorie alternative to other kinds of chocolate, but that – quite frankly – would be crazy. Chocolate tea is an adjunct to those things, not a replacement.
Cocoa nibs are chocolate in its purest form. It’s the base product from which we get – by several forms of culinary alchemy – the chocolate hobnob and the Toblerone. The Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs were partial to a cup of cocoa nibs steeped in hot water almost 4000 years ago. If, through some kind of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure scenario, you could acquaint an ancient Mesoamerican with Shen Nung, the Chinese emperor who, legend has it, invented tea in 2737 BC, then this tea could have been invented several millennia before it actually was.
3. Bird & Blend – Chocolate Digestives
On the face of it, this tea and I really shouldn’t get along. I have several firmly held beliefs about tea and tea-type beverages, and one of these beliefs is (or rather was) that liquorice has no place in tea. Now, I like liquorice. I enjoy a Pontefract cake as much as the next Pontefract-cake-enjoying person. But, in my experience, making a hot drink with liquorice is a really bad idea.
This tea made me reconsider that conviction and all my prejudices and life choices up to that point. Bird & Blend’s Chocolate Digestives tea contains liquorice alongside tea, chocolate nibs, cardamom and fenugreek, and it is absolutely marvellous. There’s a wonderfully deep, warm undertone to the whole thing that is difficult to pinpoint, even after you’ve actually read the ingredients list. This tea accomplishes the whole tasting-like-chocolate-digestives objective masterfully, with what I would call a certain je ne sais quoi, if je didn’t already sais exactly quoi it was. This is a rich, decadent, indulgent treat in a teacup. I’m not saying it’s better than actual chocolate digestives, but it is hotter, more drinkable, and just as much fun.
2. Birdhouse Tea Company – Jaffa Cake
Birdhouse Tea Company haven’t mucked about with this Jaffa Cake-inspired tea blend. There are cocoa husks (for the chocolatey layer), orange (for the ‘smashing orangey bit’), rooibos (for the sponge) and black tea (for the tea). And it really, really works. Forget Aldi’s milquetoast attempts. If you want something that recreates the full Jaffa Cake experience in a hotter and more sippable format than McVites’ original biscuit/cake/biscake, you can’t go wrong with this one.
Birdhouse’s other biscuity blends include bourbon biscuit and jammie hearts. There’s also their Muddy Boots tea, a combination of tea, cocoa husks and vanilla for any chocolate tea purists. Make no mistake about it, these are all great teas. But it’s the Jaffa Cake blend that secures the coveted silver in this tea list. The “Are Jaffa Cakes biscuits or cakes?” debate may still rage on (it shouldn’t, by the way, it was definitively declared to be a cake in a VAT tribunal in 1991), but at least – for now – we can be confident of the best jaffa cake tea. It’s this little number right here.
1. SaChasi – Chocolate-dipped Macaroons
SaChasi’s Chocolate-dipped Macaroons might be a controversial choice for the Number 1 spot in this list because, as I understand it, there are some weirdos out there who don’t like coconut with their chocolate. These wrong ‘uns led to Mars producing limited edition ‘No Bounty’ tubs of Celebrations last Christmas, which, quite rightly, outraged a nation. If you are of the coconut-avoiding persuasion, you might want to give Chocolate-dipped macaroons a swerve, but it is, to my mind, the absolute best biscuit-type-thing tea on the market right now. Maybe it’s the three types of cacao (husks, nibs and cocoa powder), maybe it’s the liberal amount of desiccated coconut pieces, maybe it’s the mesquite powder (your guess is as good as mine here, I have no idea what mesquite brings to the tea party) but whatever it is, this is a truly magnificent indulgent treat in a teacup.
SaChasi’s other dessert-trolley-inspired blends include Red Velvet Cupcake, Raspberry Rose Friands, Custardy Apple Crumble, Lemon Meringue Pie, and literally a billion more. (Maybe not literally.) For a sweet-treat-inspired tea emporium, there are surprisingly few straightforward biscuit flavours. I’ve taken some liberties by including waffles and macaroons in a biscuit tea list, but boundaries are, after all, there to be leapt over with gay abandon.
We live in a world where Aldi – presumably unironically – puts the words “Discover the Perfect Cuppa!” on their oversweetened, tasteless biscuit tea offerings. We need companies like SaChasi manning the front lines of dessert-inspired beverages.
