Everything Is Bad Now pt LVII: PG Tips

For years I’ve been looking for a good “standard” tea. You know, just something you can drink in the morning while you’re too tired to make any decisions, or brew tea properly.

But I’ve been doing all these various weird fancy teas, and I like them all. Mostly TGW, who has amusing teas like the Japanese one that yields only 15 kilos per year, but none of the trees are ever exposed directly to the sun, and stuff like that. And I’ve learned what “FTGFOP1” means! (Finest Tippy Golden Fsomething Orange Pekoe First Flush. (Oh, yeah, the second F stands for Flowery.))

But choosing one is too much work in the morning, and perhaps I don’t want a tea that has reads web site “grassy, fishy notes” first thing in the morning. I wasn’t successful in finding A Standard One until a year and a half ago, when I read that PG Tips was the most sold brand in the UK. I gave it a try, and…

It was great! Many of the “standard” cheap brands, like Yorkshire Gold and stuff, have a slightly unpleasant bitterness going on. Others, like Lipton, just taste awful all around. Twinings has several blends that are fine, but they’re all slightly annoying in one way or another — too weak, too strong, too bitter, too sweet, too whatever.

The flavour of PG Tips could be described very simple: It tasted like tea.

That’s it. It’s like the Platonic ideal of tea taste. It just tastes like tea. Not grasslike, not bitter, not sweet, not flowery. Just tea.

But I ran out of the stash I bought a year and a half ago, and yesterday I went to buy some more, and I got this huge sack. But then I came home and read at the back: “New PG Tips Original”!?

What!?

So I gave it a try this morning and… beurk.

I mean, it looks reasonable — it gives the water a tea-like colour. But the flavour is what you may call minimalist: It somehow makes the hot water taste essentially more like hot water.

I’m not trying to be hyperbolic here, but there’s just no flavour. It reminds me of when I had covid the first time — there’s a flavour void going on. (Hey, perhaps they can change the marketing to “Remember those halcyon days of Corona when you could stay home all day and nothing tasted of anything? PG Tips remembers”.)

Yes, I checked the back, and it’s not expired. Still, there might just be a production flaw for these big bags, so I googled:

I’ve been a PG drinker for 40+ years and these new bags are the death knoll of the brand IMO. The best description I can give them is bland/watery and uninviting. They’ve lost the brightness they used to have, its like they removed all the flavonoids and just left the tannins.

So it’s not just me. Apparently PG Tips was bought by Lipton, and then by some kind of venture capitalist, and now it tastes like nothing.

Heh:

My family loves PG Tips for an everyday, wake me up type tea, and I also enjoy it for milk teas, but we just got their latest version and it’s horrible! It has no flavor and even the color is weak! I tried using twice the tea bags and I still can’t get the strong flavor of the original.

If I’m reading the statistics right, PG Tips used to be the largest brand in the UK, but now:

I guess I’ll try the other standard brands… otherwise it’s back to drinking Japanese tea that has fishy, grassy notes. And this bag of PG Tips goes in the trash.

In conclusion: This is the worst thing that has even happened to humankind.