Twinings – Decaffeinated Earl Grey
Twinings – Decaffeinated Everyday Tea
The new normal of lockdown world has brought about many changes for us all. In my case, it has meant that in my day job as an IT geek, I have been working from home every day for over a year. I have a cosy little home office shed-type arrangement, which, as you might expect, has full tea-making facilities practically within arm’s reach of my laptop.
This has understandably led to an increase in my already high levels of tea consumption. Sometimes I absentmindedly put the kettle on when I’m still halfway through my current cup. In one of those cumulative line graphs that we’re all so fond of these days, my daily tea intake would be skyrocketing off the top right hand corner like, well, like a skyrocket. And this is all well and good. I’m not about to diss tea drinking as a pastime. There are many things I would like to change about myself (my weight, looks and entire personality for a start) but my passion for tea is not one of them.
But there comes a point, usually when I’m wide eyed, scaling the walls, and plagued by imaginary bats, like Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, when my brain says, “Don’t you think you might have had a tad too much caffeine today, hmm?” And because sometimes it’s good to listen to the voices in your head (but not the ones that tell you to go out and kill people with hammers), I invested in some decaff teas to join in my stalwart regulars. I dabble in green teas, and I enjoy a cup of rooibos now and again. But sometimes, you just want a cup of the brown stuff.
Here’s the thing about decaff teas: They aren’t as good as the real thing. They’re just not. I’m sure Twinings – and multiple other teamongers – are working very hard to produce a decaffeinated tea blend that is indistinguishable from its caffeinated fellows. They probably have highly qualified tea physicists, working day and night in high-tech futuristic laboratories, surrounded by Bunsen burners, test tubes and massive great computer screens showing long strings of numbers like something out of The Matrix, but sadly the science isn’t quite there yet.
Twinings decaffeinated Earl Grey, is a lot weaker, for example, than its regular counterpart. With normal Earl Grey tea bags, I can just pour in the water and then bash it about with a teaspoon in order to achieve the correct strength. With the decaf stuff, I need to pour over the boiling water, go and do some household tasks for ten minutes while it brews, add half the amount of milk, and I still end up with a drink that’s a bit wishy-washy.
Twinings decaffeinated Everyday Tea just tastes like cheap tea. Given that it’s the caffeine free equivalent of the best proper-cuppa-type tea out there, this is a bit of a disappointment. I mean, it’s fine. It tastes like a cup of tea I might be presented with by friends or family, where I haven’t been party to the tea purchasing decisions. I don’t screw my eyes up and spit it out in either scenario. It’s certainly an improvement on no cup of tea at all. But it doesn’t conjure the same levels of joy that I get from most of the oft-ordered teas on my tea shelf.
Decaffeinated tea is therefore, in my opinion, a somewhat lacklustre alternative to the good stuff. It’s like that bit in Twilight when Edward Cullen compares his non-human diet of wolf and lion blood to that of a person trying to subsist on tofu.
“It keeps you strong,” he says, “but you’re never fully satisfied.” Apart from taking umbrage as an actual (not vampire) vegetarian (how dare he care cast aspersions of my favourite coagulated soybean product?), I do think Stephanie Meyers may have missed a trick here. Decaffeinated tea would have worked so much better here as an analogy.
If, for some ghastly reason. I was obliged to only consume caffeine-free tea for the rest of my life, I believe I would fully appreciate the pain and sacrifice that the Twilight twinkly vampires had to endure.
