Whittard – Earl Grey
I really, really like Earl Grey. Black tea and bergamot are a marvellous combination. And the discovery of Earl Grey in my teens is probably responsible for starting this journey of tea placed Geekdom. Whittard Earl Grey is a marvellous example of the genre. It is dark (but not too dark), fruity (but not too fruity) and has wafts of flowery notes that make the whole thing entirely delightful.
Earl Grey is my tea of choice for my first cup of tea of the day. It’s how I navigate the transition from sleep to wakefulness. At present the Earl Grey in my tea canister is Twinings, and it serves me very nicely.
One of the first reviews I did on this blog was for Twinings Earl Grey, and I enthusiastically described it as “the best tea there is”. It turns out that Whittard Earl Grey is better. (Which, given that I awarded Twinings five stars, is saying something.) I wasn’t just going to take my own word for it, though.
This, I decided, called for a side-by-side comparison. Whittard versus Twinings. Who would emerge triumphant in the arena? Now, normally, I love a head-to-head challenge. Mostly because it allows me to make two cups of tea at the same time, without feeling like a total weirdo.
This time, though, it got a bit out of hand.
I started by comparing the Earl Greys from Whittard and Twinings. Whittard was the clear winner. It had layers of flavour that Twinings could only dream of accomplishing. It occurred to me, however, that I was making it a bit of an unfair comparison, because I was pitching loose leaf Whittard against Twinings tea bags, and, well, you’d expect loose leaf to trump its teabag opposition.
As luck would have it, I also had some Whittard Earl Grey tea bags knocking about the place. So this prompted Tea Comparison Number 2: Whittard Earl Grey, versus Twinings Earl Grey, both in teabag form.
Once again, Whittard was the obvious winner here. In fact, I couldn’t really determine a difference in quality between Whittard loose leaf and its teabag equivalent. That couldn’t be right surely?
This led to Tea Comparison Number 3: Whittard Earl Grey loose leaf versus Whittard Earl Grey teabag.
Whittard loose leaf should have been the champion here. It looks better for a start. There are longish rolled leaves interspersed with dried cornflowers and chunks of orange peel. The tea bag is just standard CTC-looking ordinariness. The teabag ingredient list is basically ‘tea plus flavours’ compared to its flower and peel-strewn loose leaf equivalent.
And yet, as far as I could tell, they taste exactly the same. The loose leaf might have had the marginal-est cigarette-paper-thin edge over the teabag, but I think that was just because I wanted it to.
It’s weird. When I compared Whittard English Rose loose leaf tea and tea bags, the unbagged stuff was distinctly superior but not here. Whittard loose leaf and Whittard Earl Grey tea bags are basically – in terms of taste – exactly the same product.
All this talk of chunks of dried orange made me wonder if I was doing Twinings a disservice and whether in fact, Lady Grey would be a more suitable comparison.
Taste Comparison Number 4: Whittard Earl Grey loose leaf versus Twinings Lady Grey revealed that I still like Whittard best. Twinings Lady Grey was orangier, but I’m not sure I was judging on oranginess.
Admittedly, by this stage, my critical facilities may have been hampered by the fact that I had an awful lot of tea sloshing around inside me.
It only occurred to me afterwards that I didn’t need to drink every single cup of tea I made for this post. I probably could have made the comparisons perfectly well from a few sips of each. (I could have even spat it out afterwards like a real-life tea taster.)
But, as it goes, that literally did not occur to me. So I downed nine full cups of tea in under an hour instead. They were all really nice, you see. I know I was choosing winners, but all the contestants here were a damn fine cup of tea. This, I think, neatly brings me back to my original point: I really really like Earl Grey.
Today’s featured book is Snobs by Julian Fellowes because I’m reading it at the moment. And because people often associate Earl Grey with posh types, even though in reality it’s drunk by uncultured peasants like me.
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