The Earl Grey story is older, messier, and more interesting than the label
There is a popular Twinings account that places its Earl Grey blend at the Strand shop in 1831, made at the request of Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey and Prime Minister. That is a fine story, and very tidy, which is always a reason to look at it sideways. The wider history is less neat. References to tea flavoured with bergamot appear earlier than that, and the first known printed mentions of “Earl Grey” tea seem to arrive later in the nineteenth century. Jacksons of Piccadilly also claimed a link to the original recipe, and that firm was later acquired by Twinings in the 1990s. So the honest version is this: Twinings is strongly associated with Earl Grey, but the precise beginning of Earl Grey tea remains one of those British grocery mysteries that refuses to sit still.
Twinings began with tea, coffee, and a very useful address
Twinings is a founding member of the Ethical Tea Partnership, a not-for-profit membership organisation that works to improve conditions on tea estates across major tea-growing regions. Long before modern sourcing language entered the packet copy, the business began with Thomas Twining of Painswick, Gloucestershire, who opened Britain’s first known tea room at 216 Strand, London, in 1706. Thomas Twining was born in Painswick in 1675 and died in Twickenham in 1741. His route into tea was not quite the grand family portrait one might expect. The Twinings family had roots in weaving and fulling, moved to London, and Thomas trained as a weaver before working for East India Company merchant Thomas D’Aeth. From there, tea rather got hold of him, as it has done to many people since.
The Strand, the Golden Lyon, and the business of making tea respectable
In 1706 Thomas Twining bought Tom’s Coffee House in Devereux Court, just off the Strand. Coffee houses were everywhere in London, full of business, gossip and men being terribly certain about things. Twining began selling tea as well as coffee, and also supplied dry tea to nearby coffee houses. By 1717 the business was trading at 216 Strand under the sign of the Golden Lyon, an address still tied to the name today. The logo associated with Twinings dates from 1787 and is often cited as the world’s oldest company logo in continuous use. That kind of fact sounds as though it should come with a brass plaque and somebody polishing it, but in this case it does help explain why the packet feels so familiar.
Tea, taxes, and why Britain became quite so attached
Tea was once expensive enough to make people lock it away, which is a wonderfully British combination of luxury and suspicion. In the eighteenth century, heavy taxation encouraged smuggling and made legal tea costly. Richard Twining, Thomas’s grandson, advised William Pitt the Younger on reducing tea duty, and the Commutation Act of 1784 cut the tax sharply. That change is widely credited with helping legitimate tea sales and making tea more accessible across British society. It is not the origin of this particular Earl Grey packet, but it is part of the world that made a British tea cupboard possible: black tea for mornings, flavoured tea for visitors, and one slightly neglected herbal option at the back for when someone says they are “off caffeine”.
Why it travels well in memory
For British shoppers in Canada, Earl Grey is often less about ceremony than recognition. It is the smell when the packet opens, the bergamot drifting up before the kettle has even finished its work, the memory of a parent using a proper teapot on Sundays or a grandparent who believed loose leaf tea was simply how things were done. Twinings The Earl Grey Loose Leaf carries that particular kind of cupboard nostalgia: not loud, not flashy, just unmistakably from home. Brew it carefully, argue mildly about milk, and keep the strainer somewhere sensible for once. The Great British Shop would call that a perfectly respectable plan.
