Twinings teas in general consistently fail to impress me, though before this, I mostly had tried a few of their bagged offerings. A box of this was available at an estate sale, really cheap, so I figured to give it a run. While it's better than their bagged teas, and not a bad tea at all, I'm still no fan.

For a loose-leaf tea, the product was very granular and finely chopped, as if they simply took the same stuff they put in bags and poured it into a red-painted steel can instead. The aroma was inexcusably weak, even after steeping for longer than usual because of the feeble experiences I've had with their other teas, with moderately dark color in-cup. The flavor wasn't as faint as the aroma -- pleasant enough but rather plain and flat in character. If there really is Assam in here, it's not enough to boost the blend's potency noticeably. Every single other English breakfast tea I've had (bagged or loose) has been better, so far. That said, I wouldn't feel badly serving this to guests, since it has a tolerable, moderate black-tea body. I won't launch the rest of the tin's contents into the compost pile, but I'll probably prioritize other teas over it and/or make big batches of flavored summertime iced tea from this stuff. If you do flavor your tea with lemon juice, lime juice, peppermint, spices, or other additions, I definitely recommend doing so here to cover the blandness of the base tea.

Even though I'm an inexperienced rank amateur at the tea-drinking avocation compared to a lot of folks on this site, greener than the freshly picked leaves, fairly obtuse to subtlety, I absolutely fail to understand how this brand has been impressive enough, to enough people in the U.K. and U.S., to last as long as it has. Maybe other offerings from them will come along to change my mind.

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