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Flavour: Spring

Ingredients: Green tea (75%), ginger root (5%), cardamom pods (5%), lemon myrtle, lemon verbena, flavouring (cardamom, ginger, lemon), marigold flowers

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £11 for 125g

Review: In the tin, this just smells horrible – cleaning products in the extreme. Once brewed, it’s much less offensive and simply smells of lemongrass. On tasting, however, all we got was green tea. Do not overbrew. Ginger literally flailed her arms on the first sip. The lemon and spices were non-existent. We can’t see the point of buying this when there are other, cheaper versions of the same thing – blends that actually succeed.

Best time of year to drink this: Spring

Best time of day to drink this: Morning

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Flavour: Shepherd’s Cup

Ingredients: Ironwort (sideritis scardica)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £8 for 30g

Review: The tin promises ‘hints of thyme, citrus and anise’. We struggled to find all of this. It smells like savoury seasoning – oregano or sage. It tastes like sage, too, but manages to avoid tasting like pasta. It’s closest to thyme, maybe, but milder and not as sweet. Best of all, the tin is full of clumps of the plant, like it was just harvested with no processing. Unfortunately, we can’t find it anywhere online anymore, so we’re not sure where you get it. Even the company’s website seems to have deleted it, which is a shame because we enjoyed this one. It was cleansing and refreshing. Time to grow our own ironwort!

Best time of year to drink this: It feels like a spring or summer drink

Best time of day to drink this: Anytime, but probably especially after meals

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Flavour: Moroccan Mint

Ingredients: Green tea (70%), spearmint (30%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £3

Bags Per Box: 15

Review: This is gorgeous! The actual green tea flavour is mild, perfectly balanced with the spearmint, which is fresh and slightly sweet. No green tea bitterness at all. It’s soothing and cleansing, wakeful and lively, and we could drink it every day. A must-have.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Morning or afternoon

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Flavour: Frog Prince

Ingredients: Green tea, natural raspberry flavour, raspberry leaves, raspberries and rose petals

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £7.99 for 50g

Review: Another one from the fairytale collection. It has a very pleasant aroma, like being in the woods, with a fruity tartness. We could immediately imagine wild raspberry bushes. The flavour is like a mellowed green tea. It’s nice and fresh, and not bitter at all. However, for all that raspberry in the ingredients list, we couldn’t taste it. It’s not the fruitiest of teas, nor the most exciting. It’s just a nice green tea, for people who usually find green tea a bit too strong.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Morning or afternoon

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Flavour: Squeeze Me

Ingredients: Green tea (83%), flavouring, lemongrass, orange peel (4%), orange flowers (2%), jasmine extract (1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £4

Bags Per Box: 12

Review: So…mixed feelings about this one. It smells like green tea with a hint of orange – natural, not artificial, despite it having some flavouring. It’s pleasant, like a milder green tea, due to the edge of orange. It’s not too bitter, but also not too lemony, despite the lemongrass. There’s maybe a hint of jasmine in there, as well. We wouldn’t go out of our way to buy it, because we felt it was just okay and not really special enough to order online. But it was a lovely little combination of flavours that we’re sure someone will really like.

Best time of year to drink this: All year round

Best time of day to drink this: Morning or afternoon

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Flavour: Skin Glow

Ingredients: Spearmint, burdock root, echinacea, calendula, red clover

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100% organic

Price Range: £6

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: Promoted for supporting healthy skin, we were pleased to find that it’s also nice to drink. The smell is lovely, spicy with a touch of spearmint to freshen things up. The taste is heavy on the spearmint, but then you find a deeper flavour that’s slightly bitter and ‘well rooty’, as one of us described it. We think that’s the burdock.

This is one that gets better the more you drink. It delicately balances bitter with lightly sweet, and it has a pleasant aftertaste, not to mention that wonderful, wakeful feeling of spearmint in your mouth. It’s light and earthy, and a vibrant one to have in the morning. We can also imagine it being good for when you have a cold, digestive problems, or simply when you want to unwind in the evening.

As of this writing, it seems this is now quite difficult to get your hands on unless you live in Love Tea’s native Australia. We previously bought it at Planet Organic, so perhaps you can find it in a similar store near you. You can also order it online through Love Tea’s official website.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Anytime (but it would be especially good in the morning, or after a meal)

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Flavour: Detox

Ingredients: Fennel (20%), lemon peel (16%), lemongrass, burdock root (10%), ginger (10%), spearmint, natural lemon flavour with other natural flavours (7%), rooibos (1%), natural lemongrass flavour, verbena, selenium (1%), natural basil flavour with other natural flavours

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £3

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: If you’re like us, you’re probably looking at that ingredients list and thinking that’s a lot of ‘natural flavours’. Yes, this means oils and other essences from the plant used. However, in this case, we don’t see the point. Natural basil flavour?? Why not just stick dried basil directly into the blend? And what purpose does the 1% addition of rooibos serve? We also highly doubt that 1% selenium is going to do anyone any good compared to taking a selenium supplement or eating selenium-rich nuts. This is just something to stick on the box to make the tea sound like it has extra health benefits, to make you buy it.

As you can tell, we don’t like this – at all. It smells disgusting, like lemony kitchen cleaner. Tulsi’s son said, ‘No no no no no – if you drink that tea, you are wrong.’ It tastes just as bad as it smells: foul. It’s painfully sour with that artificial-tasting edge to it that lemongrass and verbena always gives a tea, despite it being a natural plant – and there are just too many other flavours in there, competing for attention, none of them balancing each other out. Being total nerds with day jobs in the financial services industry, we couldn’t help but look at all those ingredients and declare this tea over-diversified. Even in the tea world, you really do need a more concentrated portfolio than this.

We’re marking this one an AVOID.

Best time of year to drink this: Never

Best time of day to drink this: Never

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Flavour: Popcorn Tea

Ingredients: Green tea, toasted rice

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £4-5

Bags Per Box: 15

Our Review: This is quite an interesting one – not our personal favourite but certainly interesting. It has a savoury smell, as if it’s been cooked. You can definitely smell the rice, and then the tea after. It also strangely does smell like corn, despite it being rice – and like tahini, despite no sesame in the blend. It’s clearly something to do with the combination of rice and green tea.

Tasting it, it’s quite a silky green tea. It has a very nice texture. It’s sweetish and does taste mildly of popcorn, even though we’re not sure how. It’s not bitter the way green tea is when drunk straight. There’s a strong, smoky rice aftertaste, and…yes, it even tastes like sesame. No idea why!

It’s a pleasant enough blend. We’re just unsure it’s worth the price. But we’re sure there will be people out there who like this one, and it’s always refreshing to see someone try something new and have it actually work out.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Morning

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Flavour: Jasmine Green Tea

Ingredients: Jasmine-scented green tea

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2.69

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: This is quite a simple blend you would hope can’t be done wrong.

As it brews, it smells exactly as it’s meant to. You get that lovely jasmine scent with an undercurrent of green tea. No ‘natural’ flavouring here. It tastes just how it should, too: gentle, with a lovely floral flavour.

If you’ve not tried jasmine green tea before, don’t expect to find actual jasmine petals in the blend. These are green tea leaves that have soaked up the soothing aroma of the flowers, resulting in a refreshing drink that calms as much as it stimulates. It’s a great one to wake you up in the morning, but also to re-charge and de-stress when you’ve hit a mid-afternoon slump.

You can pay a lot for jasmine green tea, depending on how it’s made and how organic the ingredients are. This blend is only £2.69 for a box of 20, allowing anyone on any budget to enjoy a Chinese staple.

Best time of year to drink this: All year round.

Best time of day to drink this: Morning and mid-afternoon.

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Flavour: Gingerbread Green Tea

Ingredients: Green tea, ginger root (29%), natural flavouring (5%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2.69

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: Green tea is really trendy, for its health benefits…but a lot of people are put off by how bitter it can be (especially if you over-brew it). Twinings seem to be on a mission to cash in on that trend and make green tea more tolerable to the general public, by sweetening it any way they can. But the truth is: it just doesn’t work. You can always taste that bitter flavour underneath, but now it’s been masked by artificial-tasting ‘flavouring’ (no matter how much Twinings insist it’s ‘natural’, it tastes manufactured).

This blend falls into that category. The initial smell is nice: gingery and slightly sweet, making you think of delicious gingerbread, as the name promises. But the flavour doesn’t live up to the aroma, even if it won a ‘great taste’ award. It’s like syrupy stem ginger…mixed with bitter green tea. It’s not a successful combination. In fact, it’s downright weird, the way those two contrasting tastes compete with each other in your mouth. It’s not the most disgusting thing we’ve ever tried, but it’s astringent and even soapy.

As Tulsi’s husband declared, ‘I don’t think green tea should taste like that.’ It combines well with delicate flowery tastes like jasmine or rose – but please, for the love of tea, stop trying to mix it with children’s sweets!

Best time of year to drink this: Winter, if you’re the sort who enjoys this one.

Best time of day to drink this: Evening / after dinner.

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