Whittard – Festive Breakfast
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There’s nothing obviously ‘festive’ about Whittard’s Festive Breakfast tea. It is a straightforward black tea blend of Ceylon and Kenyan tea leaves. There are no spices cranberries, candy canes or brussels sprouts Christmassing up the ingredients list.
So it’s perverse that I’m going to heap praise on this one, after describing Marks & Spencer’s Christmas offering – which went to the trouble of including dried fruits and spices – as “a bit perfunctory” the other day.
Maybe it’s all about the packaging. Marks & Spencer’s Christmas Spiced Tea came in a rather uninspiring stripy box, whereas this one is in a fancy, shiny tea caddy that you could hang on the Christmas tree were it not too large and completely the wrong shape.
But of course, it’s not the packaging that wins tea praise around these tea-fancying parts. It’s the quality of the tea itself. This black tea blend is a pleasure to drink. It’s robust without being distractingly heavy. The tea has a flavour which could be described as “woody” or “roasted” but is better described as “a really nice tea”.
It would be the perfect tea to serve at breakfast on Christmas morning. Obviously you’d have to tell people it’s a festive blend and display the Christmassy tea tin prominently on the breakfast table. They’d have no way of knowing it’s a limited edition Yuletide tea blend otherwise.
If you have a mind to enjoy your festive blend straight and unadorned, this tea will set you up nicely for a day of opening presents, eating your bodyweight in roast potatoes and wearing a little paper hat that will have fallen down past your ears by the end of the pudding course.
Today’s featured book is Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens. Again. I only have about three Christmas-themed books so you are going to be seeing a lot of them over the next month.
