Twinings – Plummy Earl Grey
You know when you completely fall in love with a tea blend and you want to elope with it and have its half-human, half-Camelia sinensis babies? Well, that, my friends, is exactly how I feel about Twinings Plummy Earl Grey. It’s perfect.
It’s fragrant, flowery, and fruity, yet remains an honest-to-goodness cup of proper tea that you can add a splash of milk to and dunk a biscuit in. It’s one of Twinings’ premium loose-leaf teas, a well-hidden Twinings secret of which I was completely unaware until I went to a Twinings Tea Masterclass and expanded my horizons.
How has this superior Earl Grey escaped my notice for so long? Who else doesn’t know about it? I should be stopping random strangers in the street to tell them the good news. “It’s Earl Grey but Earlier and Greyer!”
Would it beat my previous favourite Tea Keepers’ Earl Grey and Vanilla in a head-to-head tea-off? Tea Keepers’ blend does have the distinction of having actual bergamot in it, while Plummy Earl Grey suffices with ‘bergamot and plum flavouring’. I can forgive this tea that, though. I can forgive it anything. We’re practically married, after all.
Plummy Earl Grey also contains star anise alongside its “orthodox large leaf black tea” from somewhere or other. (That’s a bit weird now I look at it. Why don’t Twinings say where this stuff is grown? I’m not even after a specific plantation name. Just knowing the country it’s from would be nice.) The star anise is probably doing something terribly useful in the background; it certainly isn’t dominating the proceedings.
I can’t do a Twinings Earl Grey review without a quick debunk of the ol’ Earl Grey myth. Twinings are still dining out on their connections to the Grey lineage. Their regular Earl Grey is signed by the present holder of the title, Philip, 7th Earl Grey, by way of authentication, even though Phil is a completely different fella to Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, whom the tea is purported to be named after.
Even at the exemplary Twinings Tea Masterclass, we were told that Twinings Earl Grey was specially blended for the Earl to replicate some fancy tea he was given by a Chinese Mandarin.
This is a perfectly lovely fairy story for Twinings employees to tell one another around campfires and such. However, the Oxford English Dictionary did a full investigation into the etymology of the tea name in 2012 and found there was no mention of Earl Grey tea before 1891, forty-six years after the 2nd Earl Grey’s death, and those early references made no mention of it being a bergamot-based affair. Disappointingly, it seems that the most likely reason for the name is that it was named after a Northumbrian teamonger called Grey who fancied up one of his blends by sticking an “Earl” in front of his name to give it an air of poshness.
So, in conclusion, Twinings Plummy Earl Grey doesn’t contain any actual bergamot, is weirdly circumspect about where its leaves are grown, and has nothing to do with the Earl Grey pedigree.
And yet, I love it more than life itself. It’s the most wonderful and amazing tea ever in the whole world ever. And you can quote me on that, Twinings. In fact you can stick my signature on the packet. An endorsement from the Tea Fancier would, after all, make as much sense as one from the 7th Earl Grey.
Today’s book pairing is Tea with Jane Austen by Kim Wilson. Austen was a customer at Twinings’ tea shop back in the day.
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They still make this? 😱 I remember finding two lonely bags of this in Poundland of all places a few years ago (found one, tried it, loved it and then went back to try and find it again and found a second one then haven’t seen it since.) They were teabags though, not loose leaf. I’ll take the hassle of loose leaf though, just so I can enjoy it again. 😋
Wow, that was a find! You must have got quite the bargain getting it from Poundland. I know not everything is £1 in Poundland these days (I don’t approve but I have learnt to accept it) but I bet it was considerably cheaper than the twelve or so quid it costs from Twinings.