Whittard – Piccadilly Blend
Back in the early days of this tea-fancying malarky, I reviewed Whittard Piccadilly Blend. I sang its praises from the rooftops and said it was “absolutely bloody marvellous”. And I stand by that assessment.
However, this blend has been a source of confusion over the last year-and-a-bit. Happily, I now have a fresh supply of Piccadilly Blend (very kindly gifted to me by the good folks at Whittard) and can finally get to the bottom of the matter.
The ingredients listed for Piccadilly Blend are black tea, hibiscus, flavouring and cornflower petals. So when I tried this tea last year, I assumed that the primary flavour here (apart from the tea itself) was hibiscus. It was 2021. I was young. I knew little of life. The tea I was drinking was delightfully flowery and I assumed that that must be what hibiscus tastes like.
Ergo, I assumed that I must like hibiscus.
And then, in the year that followed, every tea I had with hibiscus in it was a raging disappointment. I have since concluded that I don’t like hibiscus in tea at all and that – along with rosehip – it primarily tastes of “generic red tisane”.
So why, I wondered, did I like Whittard Piccadilly – a blend of black tea and hibiscus – so much?
Well, now I have my hands on some more, the mystery has been solved. Whittard Piccadilly Blend doesn’t taste of hibiscus at all. It tastes of rose. And as regular readers will know, I am very fond of a black tea and rose blend. The packaging describes it as having “the flavours of rose, strawberry and lotus”. I will attest to a bit of strawberriness here (I have no idea what lotus is supposed to taste like) but really this is, at heart, a rose tea.
There are no rose petals in here. The ingredients list hasn’t changed. So all this comes via the “flavourings”. Nevertheless, it is a bit weird that I missed this the first time around. I think a lot of it comes down to the packaging. My first batch was in a tin and this one is in a cardboard pouch. The tin doesn’t display the explanatory blurb that the pouch does. (I did think that Whittard may have updated their wording since I bought this last year but looking at the website the tin still looks blurbless.)
Despite the no-actual-rose-ness of this tea, it remains an utterly delicious brew which I could cheerfully drink all day long. And – thank goodness – I now understand why. The world has started making sense again.
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