Is Yorkshire Tea Good?

Is Yorkshire Tea good, in summary: Yorkshire Tea is among the better mass market everyday blends for the strong milky job, with a genuinely useful Hard Water variant, but it is still CTC.

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Yorkshire Tea inspires unusual loyalty; here is the neutral verdict. This sits in the brand knowledge cluster beside is PG Tips good.

Last reviewed by the teas.co.uk team in May 2026.

Is Yorkshire Tea good, at a glance

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Aspect	The read
What it is	A strong Assam and Africa CTC blend; Gold a richer step up
Genuinely good at	A robust, dependable everyday brew; a hard water variant that actually helps
The water angle	Hard Water version is a genuine, useful formulation, not a gimmick
Leaf grade	CTC: built for strength and consistency, not loose leaf nuance
Verdict	One of the best mass market everyday blends for the job; not a fine tea

What it is, and the Hard Water blend

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Made by Taylors of Harrogate, a long established family firm rather than a faceless multinational line, Yorkshire Tea is a robust, full bodied black blend assembled to a target flavour profile and held there year after year by constant tasting and re blending. Like other mass market blacks it is largely CTC for strength, speed and milk friendliness, and against that brief it performs well: a deep, rounded, slightly malty mug that takes milk confidently and does not collapse if you forget it for a minute, see builders tea. The single most useful distinguishing fact, and the one that earns more loyalty than any advert, is the separate Hard Water blend, which is not marketing dressing. Most of Britain lives in hard water areas where dissolved minerals mute extraction and throw a dull film on the surface, flattening flavour through no fault of the tea; Taylors re proportions a blend to push back against that, and in a genuinely hard water house the difference from the standard blend is real and immediately tasteable, see best water for tea.

The limits, and how it compares

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Being clear means naming the ceiling. Yorkshire Tea is an excellent example of its type, but it is still a strong everyday CTC blend, so it shares the category trade off: power and consistency in exchange for the aromatic complexity of a good loose leaf black, see loose leaf vs tea bags. It will not give you the muscatel of a fine Darjeeling and is not meant to, so comparing it to single origin leaf is the usual category error. Within its own class it is at or near the top, noticeably rounder and less one note than the briskest supermarket blends. Against its direct rivals the picture is measured: the genuinely decisive factors between the major brands are narrower than loyalty suggests, your water, whether you take milk, and a taste for brisk versus rounded, and on value it behaves like the rest of the mainstream tier, an extremely low per cup cost where the only real upgrade question is what trading up actually buys, see saving money on tea.

How to get the best from it

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With this blend in particular the water question is decisive, so first, if you are in a hard water area, genuinely try the Hard Water blend rather than assuming it is a gimmick, the single biggest improvement available to a Yorkshire drinker and no extra cost. Second, brew it properly: fully boiling water straight onto the bag, a real three minutes, one squeeze, milk in after, not a rushed dunk that leaves it grey and hollow, see how to make tea. A great deal of the affection for the brand is familiarity and identity rather than measurable superiority, which is fine so long as it is named for what it is: the blend genuinely is well made and the Hard Water version genuinely solves a real problem, but it is still a strong everyday CTC tea, and matched to your water and brewed with care it is a reliably good mug at very low cost rather than a rival to fine loose leaf.

What to buy

For more in the cup than a CTC bag gives, the upgrade is loose leaf, not another brand: browse the loose leaf range or a better everyday black tea. Browse the full tea shop; free UK delivery over £35.