I really recommend Yorkshire Gold but (if they still make it) Co-op Indian Prince is/was a cracking cuppa.
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Sorry - PG Tips is floor sweepings in a teabag, and tastes almost, but not quite, completely unlike tea. If you want a robust regular British style tea I like Co-op 99 blend, or if that’s not available Twinings English Breakfast. Yorkshire Tea is pretty good too, and some of the Irish blends are mighty fine. However, it is crucial to make it right. If you order tea and someone brings you hot water and a teabag, it’s already too late - the water needs to be just off the boiling point and poured straight over the bag, leave it any longer and it isn’t hot enough to extract all the flavour. For the aforementioned builder’s tea, which is really the only way to drink mass-market teabag tea, you then need to leave it to brew for at least 2 minutes, give it a good squish with a spoon or teabag tongs, then add milk. The milk is important too - US milk is uniformly terrible in my experience, it all seems to be homogenised UHT, and that really distorts the flavour of tea, semi-skinned fresh milk is best, or failing that, fresh whole milk. I have no idea why much of the US thinks I might want cream in my tea. Cream in tea is an abomination.
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Thanks - you made the points I was going to, about tea being blended for the water it’s expected to be used with and becoming stale.
Personally, I go for Sainsbury’s Red Label (the supermarket’s ‘standard’ variety, neither bargain nor premium) at home and Yorkshire (standard, not Gold) at work. I tend to brew the latter for a shorter period than the former - I do favour what Wikipedia calls ‘builder’s tea’, but Yorkshire’s too strong for me to drink hourly (which is what I’m looking for) and fully-brewed Gold is rocket fuel.
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Generally agreed but there are exceptions:
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- yorkshire gold
- yorkshire
- yorkshire hard water
- some other teas, including own brand red and gold labels from sainsburies and Aldi
- pg at a push
6 - 98. all other teas
…
.99 tetley - if you like this, you like tannin, not tea. sorry to break it to you. thier attempts at chai are promising, i’ll give them that (ayurveda chai is a better brew, can’t comment on others, but just make your own spice blend, it’s worth the effort)
.100 kwik-save no frills floor sweepings, thankfully lost to retail history, but best buy do a pretty appaling tea for those wishing to relive the horrors of the past and educate future generations lest we stray down that dark path once more
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Sainsburies Red Label is the only tea I’ve ever regretted buying, personally I’m happy with PG Tips, but my flatmates prefer Yorkshire, so that’s what we usually get.
Yorkshire do a special brand that’s for hard water areas, but I’ve always lived in hard water areas and just drank normal tea, so I don’t notice the difference.
Tea bags that have been left lying around for months tend to taste weird, especially if you’ve chucked them in the back of a cupboard that also stores spices. Still, it took four of us two months to get through a catering sack of 1200 bags, so maybe our experience doesn’t translate well to the US?
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These taste of nostalgic memories of underdeveloped dunking techniques.
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Aww, now I’m craving for a whole bowl of Barry’s Gold. Sends me back to my student’s years. Makes for a very efficient kick for breakfast.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, in France you can only buy it in shops of the Comptoir Irlandais franchise, and there’s none near where I live now. I miss some Power’s whiskey for the same reason.
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Personally, when I can afford to buy a tin of it, my ultimate favorite is Campbell’s. It’s loose leaves, so I use an infuser. Brew time is short or it gets bitter, but it produces a mighty fine cup. Half a kilo might seem like a lot to buy at one time (for tea, anyway), but it stays fresh in the metal can and I can go through it pretty fast. Strong tea - more tea, not more time.
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Ah yes, Kwik-Save. Where a sense of depression and dread came free with every purchase.
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I’ve never understood the concept of “blends” – all tea originated from an area around the Chinese/Thai/Lao border region. The English brought tea to India after the debacle in China. What’s with these “blends”? Do people croon over whiskey or tequila blends? No. Blends are meant to mask an inferior product. And in the case of tea, that means you need to mask the bitterness with milk and sugar which is little different from using perfume in past centuries to mask the stink of people who seldom took baths. Good tea doesn’t need anything but tea leaves and hot water.
After living in Hong Kong Beijing and Osaka for 15 years which are very tea-based cultures, I moved to SE Asia and found that Thai, Laos and Vietnam has some really amazing teas. I’m now living in Phnom Penh and there is a small shop near the river that sells unbranded bags of Vietnamese green tea that are hand rolled into little balls. It’s not cheap by local standards (I spend maybe $5 a month which gives me a large pot of tea each morning that can be refilled 4-5 times before it gets weak) but it’s very very good. The balls expand out into full leaves within a couple of minutes after water has been added and the smell and flavor stand up against any of the tea you buy in 100 year old back alley shops in Hong Kong that look like Olivander’s Wand Shop in Harry Potter.
Tea snobs will look down on me, because I use tap water, and heat the water in a cheapo electric kettle and my tea pot is a factory second classic white chinese tea pot I found in Russian market for $3. But that’s okay, all I care about is that wonderful smooth mellow taste which outshines almost anything I’ve ever tasted anywhere else…
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Another vote for Tetley’s British blend, and I’ve had both Barry’s and Tetleys, and a bunch of others.
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I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it does depend what you’re seeking. For me, that’s specifically a beverage made (in a mug) with boiling (not hot, not boiled, actively boiling) water, black tea of unremarkable quality, then milk and sugar, all repeated roughly hourly.
You may prefer to savour high-quality, milkless and unsweetened tea, and that’s fine, but it’s not the only true way to take tea. 
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I find it hilarious that someone who recommends PG Tips passes as someone with “deep knowledge” of tea in the US. To a British person this would be like recommending Starbucks coffee like it’s rare and exotic. In the UK PG is pretty much the vanilla, default choice for people who have never given any thought to blends or quality.
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Beware mentioning your Barry’s preference to an Irish person, lest you get dragged into the holy war.
I have no idea why much of the US thinks I might want cream in my tea. Cream in tea is an abomination.
Probably because the milk is so awful for tea. I go with half & half in my floor sweepings, personally, or grin and bear it with a black cup.
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I heard they add sugar to the milk in the US too, is that true?
I like a strong Assam from time to time, but traditionally it would be used to make chai, with spices and looots of milk, if you just want a normal cuppa in the morning it’s a bit too astringent, which is where the blends come into play. The Kenyan teas Barry’s add to the Assams broaden the flavor profile and reduce the bitterness, if you had the Kenyan by itself it wouldn’t have the depth of flavour nor the kick I need to get me going. I think other tea blends use more Ceylon than Barry’s use, and they’re usually much less full bodied than the north Indian teas.
A strong brew of a quality blended tea gives you a drug-like hit (intense relaxation spreading out from your head to your shoulders and down your back) when you do it properly first thing in the morning, hard to replicate with either lower quality blends or single leaf types.
I just take it with a very small splash of semi-skimmed (full-fat overpowers the taste a bit, you’re looking for a mahogany colour), make a pot with the leaves (classic blend, which is stronger) for my first 2-3 cups in the morning, then switch to tea bags (usually gold blend) for another few cups throughout the day. Might have a Darjeeling or Earl Grey in the evening, without milk, for something a bit lighter. Don’t really know much about Chinese teas, but what I have had has been far less satisfying than a strong blend like Barry’s, no doubt there’s a time and a place for those too if you have the time and money to track down the good stuff though, they’re never going to provide the required number of cups to get me through a day though.
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I heard they add sugar to the milk in the US too, is that true?
To flavored milk like chocolate and strawberry, yes. I’ve never heard of sugar being added to white milk, though. Unamericans probably just aren’t used to the sweet, sweet taste of recombinant bovine growth hormone. So sad.
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A strong brew of a quality blended tea gives you a drug-like hit (intense relaxation spreading out from your head to your shoulders and down your back) when you do it properly first thing in the morning, hard to replicate with either lower quality blends or single leaf types.
Wait…I thought we were discussing the drinking of tea. I haven’t mainlined it since the 90’s.
