Taste the Difference

 It's true. I can taste the difference. Sainsbury's is right.

EGT

I used to laugh at the British on holiday in Spain or France or Greece or Italy. They toted along their own teabags from home."Honestly," I tutted. Now we do it, or at least we did it. We became tea smugglers: every trip to England involved stuffing ziplock bags full of tea. Our poison is Sainsbury's own brand "Taste the Difference" fair-trade Earl Grey. In bags, not loose. We're not that crazy.

We're also partial to Sainsbury's own brand Red Label orange pekoe, or 'naff tea' as we call it. But our true love is EGT. We even discovered that we had--inadvertently or at least unconsciously--given our children names that matched those initials. Maybe we are that crazy.

Naff tea

Between our own visits back to the UK and visitors coming to us, we have been able to keep ourselves in fairly constant supply this past decade. (We arrived in Toronto ten years ago today. Happy anniversary to us, eh?) But Coronavirus has kept us from the motherlode, from traveling at all. We ran through our not-inconsiderable stockpile some months back and turned to local versions: various supermarket own-brands, Tetley's, a few specialist tea shops. I thought I had adjusted; perhaps I had only imagined there was any real difference.

Yesterday morning my dear husband rose earliest and brought me a cup of tea in bed. We always start off with Earl Grey, and this particular brew was superlative. I knew he had opened a new packet just the night before and emptied the bags into our tea caddy. "This is so good!" I said. "Do you remember which brand it was? Longo's? President's Choice?" 

He looked slightly stricken. "It was Sainsbury's," he said. "I found one more box in the pantry." Damn it. There is a difference, and I had tasted it.

Red Label, we discovered, can be purchased in Canada through Amazon, at the cost of C$36 for 160 bags (500g). The same product at Sainsbury's sells for GBP 2-00, about 1/10th the price. Not for our pocketbooks, sadly. Sainsbury's own-brand Earl Grey cannot be had at all. Looks like we'll be slumming it, tea-wise, for the foreseeable future. 

Damn this virus.