Earl Grey

Bleh!

I’ve been away all weekend on family get together thing and it’s on the other end of the country. My parents had opted for a slightly alternative route than the obvious one and it involved a 45 minute ferry-trip.

This is what they served in the cafeteria there.

It was heavily perfumed and tasted mostly of lemon with a backdrop of bergamot. It was a rather dusty and old sort of flavour. Drinkable, I guess, and I’ve certainly had worse, but not really particularly inspiring.

I was however finding it a rather nice break in the travelling experience and as such it served its purpose quite nicely.

Also, I’m going to be scarce on Steepster for a few days. My 52tea Christmas package hasn’t arrived yet and I don’t want any spoilers about the contents, so I’ll be steering clear of the Dashboard until I’ve got it. (If it’s the one that was delivered to the package pick-up place in Copenhagen by mistake, it shouldn’t take very long)

My husband and I went out to Shari’s for breakfast this morning, and I ordered the Earl Grey. Ugh! Horrible. That was Earl Grey? What a shame that that disgusting tea shares the same name as some of the best teas I’ve ever tasted.

I could only swallow two sips, and then had to ask the waitress to take it back and bring me juice instead.

Oh. My. GOD. This has to be the worst tea I’ve yet had in my (I’m still insisting it’s short) life thus far.

I went to Humpty’s yesterday (oh, Humpty’s, night owls everywhere thank you for your blessed existence…) and had a wonderful breakfast of bennies and perogies, ahh. I also had apple juice, and ordered a tea, but pocketed the Lipton bag the server gave me (thank heavens) on the side and steeped David’s Nepal Black instead. What a lovely meal.

Well, that Lipton’s bag was still in my pocket today, so I scored some hot water with honey off SBUX and steeped this worryingly steamrolled-looking little bag. Good grief, I would have been better off drinking honey water.

The dry smell is nasty. Like tea dipped in some sort of cleaner. The wet smell is actually worse – my notes (yeah, I have a little tea notebook now, what a dork) say, “Cleaner and black pepper! Huh?”

But the taste! Gack! Hurk! It tastes like a cardboard box shoved to the back of the top shelf of the closet in your spare room would taste if it were liquefied – oh, but not before you dunked it in Lemon Pledge furniture cleaner! Oooh, can I insert that little red >_< face from the rating scale?

Ew!

I needed something to warm me up at lunch time, so I got a cup of this at the restaurant (it was a choice between this and ‘orange peacock’ I swear to god that’s what the waitress called it!). I didn’t steep it very long and it came out quite pleasently light with an almost floral, citrusy taste.

Not bad at all for a generic earl grey. I suspect the key thing was the fact that I didn’t steep it very long.

It’s plain, it’s boring, it’s on a grocery store shelf near you: Lipton Earl Grey

I think I took this from a hotel room or something. I didn’t buy it/seek it out. Anyway, with a lot of milk and some sweetener this is a drinkable cup.

It isn’t as horrible as most of the other reviewers have suggested (the packaging of the tea bag I used was rather different from that in the pic, but there’s apparently no difference in the name, so I suppose we are talking about the same tea). Yes, the bergamot flavour may not be the best one in my life and it’s kinda like bergamot + a bit of lemon, but it tastes okay. The tea base is on the earthy side and I prefer a slightly more floral and sweeter base. But as an everyday tea, this is good enough!

This isn´t Earl Grey tea, it´s more like a lemon tea…but unfortunately still about the only tea available (apart from the yellow label tea) in standard snack bars. No way I´m buying this one!

passable, but i prefer twinings.

The best Earl Grey from cheap Earl Grey bag’s teas.

Disgusting. I’m not a purist, i swear, but this has to be the worst kind of bagged tea i’ve had. It tastes like the mix of a banana peel and the white, bitter part of an orange peel. Drank this at work for the caffeine, and next time i’ll just fall asleep – thank you very much.