PG Tips
 |
|
| Product type | Tea |
|---|---|
| Owner | Unilever |
| Country | Greater Manchester, England, UK |
| Introduced | 1930 |
| Previous owners | Brooke Bond |
| A Tale of Two Continents | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | "Monkey" |
|
Release date
|
21 March 2008 (cinema) |
|
Running time
|
9 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
PG Tips is a brand of tea in the United Kingdom, manufactured by Unilever UK.
In the 1930s, Brooke Bond launched PG Tips in the tea market in the United Kingdom under the name Pre-Gest-Tee. The name implied that it could be drunk prior to eating food, as a digestive aid. Grocers and salesmen abbreviated it to PG.
After the Second World War, labelling regulations ruled out describing tea as aiding digestion—a property that had been attributed to tea—and by 1950/1 the PG name was adopted. The company added "Tips" referring to the fact that only the tips (the top two leaves and bud) of the tea plants are used in the blend.
The Brooke Bond name has now been dropped from all packaging, and the product is now known as PG Tips. PG Tips is available as loose tea, tea bags, and in vending formats. A "Special Blend" tea, which is the same as the tea blended for the brand's 75th anniversary, is available in tea bag form only. The tea used in PG Tips is imported in bulk as single estate teas from around the world and blended in precise proportions set by the tea tasters to make blend 777, which can contain between 12 and 35 single estate teas at any one time (depending on season, etc.) at the Trafford Park factory in the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, Greater Manchester.
PG Tags, tea bags with a string, were launched in 1985, and tetrahedron-shaped tea bags in 1996 (branded as Pyramid Bags). The tetrahedral bag was designed to help the tea leaves move more freely, as loose tea moves in a teapot, and supposedly create a better infusion. One 2011 version of the product packaging makes the claim: "The PG Tips pyramid tea bag gives the tea leaves 50% more room to move around than a flat conventional tea bag. So the tea bag works more like a miniature tea pot. This allows for all the freshness to be released for the best tasting cup of PG." During the T-Birds era, the tetrahedral tea bags were remade with a "freeflow" material, to allow further infusion of the tea.
In Scotland, Unilever sells a specially developed blend of PG called Scottish Blend. Scottish Blend is a version of PG Tips marketed in Scotland, as being specially blended to optimise taste in the soft waters of Scotland.
...
Wikipedia