Before we really get into this Coronet Breakfast Tea review, I have a confession to make. This tea is four years past its best before date. Now, properly stored tea should last a very long time – it doesn’t technically “go off” as long as it is kept dry. However, it does go stale.
Stale tea won’t have the same strength or freshness, but it will still produce a drinkable cup. That’s good enough for me. So, I decided to go ahead with this tea review instead of throwing away the old teabags. Just keep in mind that the fresh tea may have scored higher!
If you’d like to buy Coronet Breakfast Tea fresh to taste it for yourself, you can sometimes find it on Amazon UK using the links below. Otherwise, the best way to find Coronet teas is to stumble onto them in hotel rooms up and down the country.
Coronet Breakfast Tea at a Glance
Izzy’s Rating
- Origins: Unknown
- Flavour: Weak, astringent and bitter black tea with a few bright notes
Drinking this tea black could kill you. Even with milk, it is astringent and bitterly unpleasant… yet somehow also weak. Beyond the bitterness, there’s no body. It’s all bark and no bite.
Full Review – Coronet English Breakfast Teabags
- Type: Tagged square paper filter teabags
- Tea: Black tea
- Origins: Unknown
- Flavour Notes: Astringent, bitter, bright
- Aroma: Malty, brisk
- Milk or Lemon: Milk and sugar
- Where to Buy: Amazon UK
Opening the foil packet, I was surprised at just how well this old tea managed to hold onto its natural aroma. It smells malty and brisk like all good breakfast teas should. So far, so good.
Once you add water, it quickly brews into a very dark tea shade – it’s a classic and it’s begging for a drop of milk. I’ve used soy milk for my review as it’s what I have in all my teas and I’m accustomed to the taste. However, if you can have dairy milk I highly urge you to give full fat milk a go. The creaminess will really help make this drinkable.
The brewed tea is… meh. The aroma is just as brisk and malty as it was before I brewed it, but the flavour is lacking. From the second it touches your tongue, it’s astringent in a mouth puckering way and sweeps in with growing bitterness in every subsequent sip. It’s bright too. The flavour notes are all high and bitter, with no warmth or richness to balance it out.
But it does have a few redeeming qualities. First, the texture is very smooth on your tongue and it’s easy going down. Coronet Breakfast Tea also has a drying quality that makes it a really good palate cleanser. If you’re eating a heavy breakfast, this tea will help you wash it all down and make space for just one more bite of pastry, toast or hearty fry up.
How to Brew Black Breakfast Tea
Coronet recommends a 3 to 4 minute brew time in freshly boiled water. That’s a standard time and temperature combination for English Breakfast tea and it will produce a cup strong enough to add milk. If you want to drink this tea without milk (I do not recommend it) then brew for just 1 to 2 minutes before taking a sip and brewing for longer if need be.
Milk is a must. Sugar is recommended too – and I don’t usually add anything sweet to my breakfast teas, so that really tells you something about the dire state of this cuppa.
Don’t have this tea too late in the afternoon as it feels quite high in caffeine. It is a breakfast tea after all.
Why Coronet Tea?
I can’t find any information about Coronet online. I stumbled on these teabags in a hotel room in the UK. It wasn’t a fancy hotel – just something within close reach of the motorway on a journey to somewhere exciting.
It seems that Coronet is one of those wholesale brands that offers single-serve items for hotel chains. According to reviews online you can find them in Best Western hotels. Someone on Steepster stumbled upon them in a hotel room in Basingstoke. I think my hotel was a Holiday Inn, but it could have been a Premier Inn.
The quality of the tea is bleak. We don’t know where it’s from but most generic tea comes from either Kenya, China or India… or possibly all three countries. We can’t rule out this tea being from multiple countries and then blended together in the UK.
With those rolled dot shapes, it’s clear that this tea was processed with the Crush Tear Curl (CTC) method. This method is used to create tea that brews very quickly, which is just what you want for teabags. Unfortunately, the tea leaves used to create CTC tea are often of the lowest quality. Sometimes they’re not even tea leaves, just twigs that got caught up in the machine. That’s why Coronet Breakfast Tea is so cheap.
Summary
Coronet Breakfast Tea is exceptionally cheap and low quality. It produces a beverage that will get you through breakfast but you most definitely won’t find yourself longing for another cup any time soon.
If you want to try Coronet Breakfast Tea for yourself or your business (the wholesale price is quite attractive despite the mediocre flavour) you can first find it on Amazon UK to sample the flavour.
Tea Recommendation
When it comes to good breakfast tea in the UK, I’m often asked to name an affordable brand that’s a bit better than the likes of Yorkshire, PG Tips and Tetley but still palatable to the everyday drinker. Personally, I’d go for either Ahmad Tea or Twinings. You can read my full comparison of the two brands in this Ahmad vs Twinings article.
