Earl Grey tea is back: Twinings gives in to outraged tea-drinkers

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Earl Grey tea is back. After complaints from customers about its tampered-with new blend, which was rebranded as The Earl Grey and made with extra bergamot and lemon for a more citrussy taste, Twinings has said it’s bringing back the old blend. Its website announces:

Whilst many love the new Earl Grey, a group of Earl Grey fans have asked us to make the previous blend available. Not wishing to disappoint, we have introduced Earl Grey The Classic Edition.

The new Earl Grey with its stronger lemony flavour offered, the company said, “a distinctive citrusy flavour and aroma that fills the air with the promise of summer orchards”. Twinings even claimed that “the Earl himself couldn’t have imagined how wonderful his favourite tea could taste”. Never mind the long-dead Earl, regular drinkers of the company’s long-standing blend were appalled at the new flavour. One customer wrote: “I cannot describe how awful this new tea tastes. The old award-winning tea was in a completely different league to this foul-tasting dishwater.” Another called it an “affront to tea”. A Facebook campaign was started. And, now, classic Earl Grey is back.

There are three things to be said about this. One is that is it demonstrates once again the folly of big companies meddling with much-loved and patented recipes. Look what happened with New Coke (the 1985 reformulation) and Classic Coke.

The second point is that it is no wonder this row over blending has happened: Earl Grey was the tea which started the trend for teas that contained aromatic ingredients other than straight, good old tea. And there are plenty of recipes other than the Twinings one. There’s Fortnum’s Smoky Earl Grey, for instance, which was created, Fortnum’s says, “in response to a request from the Palace for a smokier Earl Grey”. It contains the vital bergamot but with a touch of Lapsang and Gunpowder tea as well. And there’s the blend you can get at the Algerian Coffee House in Soho, which is called Imperial Noon and is a blend of Lapsang Souchong and Keemun with jasmine flowers and bergamot oil. That is the one I like.

The third point is that this demonstrates a wider trend where coffee becomes milkshake, vodka turns into lemonade, Ribena etc, whisky is drowned in Coca-Cola. Traditionally adult taste buds can handle “grownup”, bitter flavours that kids can’t tolerate. This is no longer entirely true. Drinks are becoming increasingly removed from their original, basic, true taste. Now delicate, fragrant tea leaves are drowned in so much citrus flavouring the result barely qualifies as tea.