Brand: 

Flavour: Super Fruit

Ingredients: Hibiscus, elderberry, currants, blackcurrants, natural flavouring, cranberries, blueberries

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £4-5 for a pack of 15 (although the picture shows a pack of 50, which costs much more!)

Our Review: On first brewing, all you can smell is sherbet – like Refreshers.  It’s the aroma of very sweet hibiscus and blueberries and sugar.

The taste, on the other hand, is very bland.  It’s not nearly as sharp as you’d expect from the scent – and it strangely grows even more flavourless as it cools down.  It’s thoroughly unexciting – and it’s so expensive!  If fruit teas are your thing, you’re much better off buying Sainsbury’s Blackberry & Blueberry – that has much more flavour, for less than half the price of the Teapigs offering.

Just about the nicest thing we can say, here, is that at least it didn’t taste of feet – a genuine concern with elderberries in the ingredients list!

To sum up, here is an excerpt from our discussion whilst trying this blend:

Ginger Tea: ‘I wouldn’t buy that.’

Three Tulsi: ‘…but we did.’

Ginger Tea: ‘Okay…but I’m not buying it again.’

Best time of year to drink this: Summer, if you’re at all interested

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoons, if you care

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Ginseng

Ingredients: Lemongrass, peppermint, rosehips, orange peel, licorice, cardamon, ginseng root, cinnamon, ginger, lemon oil, nettle, alfalfa, black pepper, celery seeds, cloves, dried kombucha drink

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated (but less than standard tea)

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 17

Review: The smell is so yummy! Minty, lemony and flowery, but also really peppery. Even the celery comes through. It’s strangely salad-like!

Tasting it…well, the inclusion of lemongrass made us nervous, but this one actually tastes of lemon, not like fake sweets, which was a pleasant surprise! It’s also slightly floral, but without tasting like soap the way many rosehip blends do. The peppermint is refreshing, and you get a nice kick from the black pepper.

If you don’t know, kombucha is a blend of fermented tea, sugar and yeast (full of healthy bacteria for the gut). It’s also high in folic acid and vitamin-K, both vital in pregnancy, but with about a third of the caffeine contained in straight tea. Plus, the inclusion of ginseng is bound to give you an early-morning pick-me-up. An excellent alternative to black / green / white teas.

Best time of year to drink this:  All year round

Best time of day to drink this: Morning

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Women’s Balance

Ingredients: Ginger, orange peel, cinnamon, fennel, chamomile flowers, dandelion, barley malt, liquorice, orange oil, black pepper, juniper berries, cardamom, cloves, angelica root extract

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 17

Review: Finally, a women’s tea without hibiscus!  You can really smell the fennel and dandelion.  It’s a very earth aroma, which is not unpleasant.

The taste, though, is so sweet.  In fact, that’s just about all you get – no flavour, just sweetness from the liquorice and fennel.  It almost hurts your teeth, it’s so intense.

We expect the combination of ingredients is probably good for your health, but it’s not particularly enjoyable to drink.

Best time of year to drink this:  Any time

Best time of day to drink this: After a meal, in place of sugary treats

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Harmonise

Ingredients: Chamomile flower (25%), shatavari root (Indian asparagus), hibiscus flower, rose flower (10%), licorice root, vanilla pod (5%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 20

Pukka Say: Balancing for women

Our Review: As expected with any ‘women’s tea’, the smell of this one is like the perfume section of a department store – but with chamomile thrown into the mix.

The taste, however, is more chamomile with a floral edge.  It’s a bit like Pukka Love, but more perfumed.  We’re not sure you can taste the other ingredients, like shatavari root – and if you, like us, don’t really know anything about shatavari root, it’s a traditional Indian remedy used to address hormonal imbalance in women.

Indian asparagus aside, this one is so similar to Love that we think you’ll either drink one or the other, but definitely won’t buy both at the same time.  To help you decide, Love has a more diverse flavour, while Harmonise is sweeter, with a rosy aftertaste.  It probably comes down to your personal taste.  For us, it’s Love all the way, but you might disagree.

Best time of year to drink this: Any time you feel a bit ‘imbalanced’

Best time of day to drink this: Following meals (it’s sweet enough to replace dessert)

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Nine months ago, I gave birth to the most beautiful little boy – our second.  He was so fragile and helpless, so tiny and vulnerable.  Now, as I write this, he’s crawling around the living room floor, trying to knock absolutely everything over and stuff it in his aching toothless mouth.

It’s been quite the journey getting to this point – and part of that journey was ‘tea’.  When I became pregnant, I discovered a whole world of tea, herbal and fruit infusions was now off limits.  For instance, I tried drinking a fennel blend to deal with terrible bloating pains in the first trimester.  It worked – but I wound up in hospital that evening for bleeding.  It thankfully turned out to be a false alarm.  However, I learned that fennel is in the parsley family and, as such, has a centuries-old history of being used as a natural abortive.  It’s entirely possible that the fennel was not responsible for my bleeding, but it left me paranoid and I wound up avoiding both parsley and fennel for the duration of my pregnancy.

A further complication was that almost every herbal blend on the market contains liquorice.  That’s okay in small doses, but too much liquorice can lead to hypertension, something common and dangerous in pregnancy.  I never had to worry about this before, as I naturally have low blood pressure; but suddenly my eight cups a day of such infusions no longer sounded like a good idea.

The question, then, was: what could I drink?  And: what infusions would actually be good for my pregnancy?

Ginger Tea – The Cure for Acid Reflux

An absolute must turned out to be ginger tea.  I struggled with relentless acid reflux.  Antacids tasted like glue and made me feel sick.  It’s also not good for the body to have too much of these medicines; it can even cause further acid reflux!  So I learned to avoid eating foods that triggered the acid (almost everything I love to eat, sadly – I later celebrated the birth by binging on berries, after seven months without them) – but I also read that ginger could help keep that acid at bay.

Unfortunately, most of the ginger teas on the market are full of other ingredients like liquorice (I’ve already covered why that was a bad idea) or lemon juice (which would make the acid worse).  I found myself thinking, Why doesn’t anyone do a tea that’s just ginger?  I then thought, Hang on…that sounds familiar…didn’t we review something like that?  Indeed, we had: T2 Just Ginger!  It was a lifesaver during my pregnancy.  It’s nothing but chopped up dried ginger pieces, pure and simple.  True, I could have chopped up real ginger myself and brewed that, but that is a task I didn’t have the time or energy for while working all day in an office, heavily pregnant – especially not with the quantities I had to drink to combat that burning feeling in my throat.

T2 Just Ginger is a little pricy, at £7.99 per box, but I found that one teaspoon could be re-brewed three or four times throughout the day.  Drunk prior to snacks and meals did the trick for me all day, in combination with avoiding those high-trigger foods.  I cannot recommend this tea enough, for those of you suffering from the same symptom – though admittedly I was sick to death of ginger by the end of my pregnancy!  Now that the baby is born, I may never drink this tea again, but that’s not T2’s fault.

Drinking Tea to Bring on Labour

I went into irregular contractions on a Sunday evening.  They stopped by Monday morning, but my waters broke shortly after.  A midwife did a home visit and told me if I didn’t go into labour within the next 24 hours, I would likely need to be induced, to avoid infection to the baby.  This made me anxious, as I had hoped for a home birth – something not possible with induction.

I considered raspberry leaf tea, as is the age-old tradition.  I had in mind Heath & Heather’s Raspberry Leaf variety.  However, we had none in the house.  My husband considered going out and buying some, but decided instead to give me Yogi Tea’s Choco Chili, on the basis that I had been drinking it shortly before the initial contractions on Sunday evening.  This tea contains cocoa shells (caffeine-free and therefore safe in pregnancy), cinnamon, liquorice (okay if I was just having one cup for the day), ginger (fabulous), black pepper, carob, anise, barley malt (watch for this, if you’re on a gluten-free diet), cloves, cardamom, ginger oil (again, brilliant), vanilla extract, vanilla beans – and chili pepper.

Tradition tells us eating something spicy will help bring on labour.  I can’t vouch for the truth in this – but I can say that contractions restarted shortly after I had this tea again on Monday evening, and our son was born Tuesday morning – at home, as planned.

The Best Tea for Post-Delivery Contractions

Something no one tells you is that you continue to have contractions after delivery – first, to deliver the placenta, and then each time you breastfeed.  This is nature’s way of contracting the uterus back down to its original size (and making you slim again!).  Unfortunately, it’s incredibly painful in the first few days after the birth, and your options for pain relief are limited, as any drugs you take are fed to the baby through breast milk.

My solution?  Tesco’s Finest Pure Peppermint Leaf pyramid bags.  This tea loosened and relaxed my stomach muscles, and aided digestion through my recovery, acting as a natural pain killer each time I had one of those spasms.

Surviving Those Sleepless Nights…and Days

The challenge with breastfeeding is that no one can help you with it.  Newborns feed 9-12 times a day, for up to an hour at a time, which means you’re feeding almost nonstop (or, in my case, literally nonstop for anywhere up to 8 hours at a stretch).  With a schedule like that, when do you find time to sleep?  Plus, I don’t know about you, but I was in a constant state of anticipation – listening out for cries, even if my husband was looking after our son in another room – expecting to be woken for feeds.  The result was that even when I miraculously got time for a nap, I found it difficult to shut down.

I combatted that problem with Pukka’s Love infusion, made with chamomile, limeflower, elderflower, marigold petals, liquorice root, rose flower and lavender.  It is instantly calming, especially sipped slowly while hot.  I had mine while the baby fed (just be careful to hold it well away from your baby, so you don’t spill hot water on him/her!), which meant that by the time he finished feeding, the tea had worked its way into my system and I was much more relaxed.  Then I could climb into bed and snatch an hour or two of rest before our son woke again.

Nine Months On…

Now that our beautiful little boy is eight months old, there seems to be a competition between him and his eleven-year-old brother for who can make the most noise and commotion.  There’s no fighting it; I’m going to lose.  But as long as they’re not destroying things, a good hot drink instantly dissipates the stress.  And I have no idea why, but the baby always opens his mouth wide with delight when he sees me pick up my mug and drink – perfect for when I’m trying to get him to accept a spoonful of mashed-up vegetables and rice.  That’s right: drinking tea is helping me wean the baby.

What makes me happiest is that I’m done breastfeeding, and I’m getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night, so I can drink whatever I want – at last!  This means Ginger Tea and I can get back to trying new things and writing more reviews for this site, and I can grab a bag at random from the tea cupboard in our kitchen and just see where it takes me.

Better still, I finally got to use that Tea Lovers Masterclass gift voucher my husband gave me for Valentine’s Day!  Watch this space for a write-up of that incredible day.

I couldn’t have made it through the last 17 months without my tea.  If you, too, found tea indispensable to your pregnancy / childbirth / baby journey, we’d love to hear your stories in the comments box below.  And be sure to subscribe to this blog to read more stories and reviews!

Until next time….

Flavour: Riotous Rose

Ingredients: Apple, hibiscus, currants, orange peel, rosehips, rose petals, papaya, pineapple, strawberry, raspberries and flavour

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £7.50

Cups Per Box: 40 (approx.)

Review: A rather predictable blend of ingredients clearly designed to target women (though we’re unsure why papaya is in there).  It smells strongly of vanilla, fruit and rose, and it looks very, very red.

As you would expect, the taste is quite tart, but with a vanilla undercurrent; there is a sharpness at the back of the throat.  Thankfully, the rose flavour is quite subtle, which prevents this infusion from tasting like the perfume section of a department store, like some rose teas do.  The drink is also quite creamy.

All in all, it’s pleasant enough, but not our favourite.  It’s neither interesting nor insane; it certainly isn’t ‘riotous’.  It just sits easily in the middle.  We aren’t saying don’t buy it, but there are better women’s / fruit teas on the market for less money.

Best time of year to drink this: Summer, maybe

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoons

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Ruby Red Rosehip

Ingredients: Rosehips, hibiscus petals, rose

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £7.50

Cups Per Box: 40 (approx.)

Review: Definitely a women’s tea – but not a good one!  It smells and tastes like Heinz tomato soup, but with a strongly floral aftertaste.  The perfume hangs in your mouth like bad potpourri.  It is both annihilatingly tart and painfully dehydrating.  No, no, no.

To sum it all up, we offered it to a friend and she asked, ‘What did I do deserve THAT!?’  Then she gargled with water.

AVOID.

Best time of year to drink this: NEVER

Best time of day to drink this: NEVER

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Liquorice & Oriental Spices

Description: To Warm and Uplift Naturally

Ingredients: Liquorice Root (37%), Cinnamon (25%), Ginger (17%), Blackberry Leaves (7.5%), Apple Pomace (5.5%), Aniseed (2%), Nutmeg (1.5%), Clove Buds (1.5%), Pepper (1%), Orange Peel (1%), Cardamom (1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £1-2

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: As you may have noticed, we’re not huge liquorice fans.  It’s nice in small doses, but too much makes a drink sickly sweet.  So, we approached this blend with caution.

The smell is spicy, due to the nutmeg and cinnamon, and makes you think of winter or Christmas.  Happily, the liquorice is actually quite mild, balanced perfectly against the spices to create an ideal combination of flavours.

Drinking it makes you want to curl up by the fireplace, bundled in blankets, and just relax.  It’s so warming.  Better still, the ingredients are traditionally used for everything from healing wounds and soothing the stomach, to taking the edge off mouth pain and easing menstrual pain.  And kids like this one, too – it’s Three Tulsi’s son’s all-time favourite.

For all these reasons, we have marked this a must-have tea we keep in the cupboard at all times.

Best time of year to drink this: Winter

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon, evening, night

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Raspberry Leaf

Description: Invigorating

Ingredients: Raspberry Leaves (30%), Hibiscus (25%), Apple Pomace (22%), Blackberry Leaves (13%), Tartaric Acid (3%), Raspberry Flavouring (2.5%), Maltodextrin (2.5%), Rosehips (1%), Raspberry Fibres (1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £1-2

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: This tea definitely lives up to its name.  The aroma is very tart, as you would expect – just like a crushed, ripe raspberry.  The taste does not disappoint: raspberry and hibiscus, yet only mildly tart (unlike some hibiscus teas you get), and with a mild sweetness, too.

Overall, this is a warming tea we recommend for cold autumn and winter months, either in the morning (to heat you up after you’ve come into work) or in the evening (after you’ve come home).  Drinking it makes you feel nice inside and out.

It’s also worth noting that raspberry leaf has long been used at the end of pregnancy, by women desperate to encourage labour.  It is thought that the leaf tones the muscles of your uterus – though it’s controversial, so be sure to do your own research, if this applies to you, and definitely avoid having lots of it in earlier stages of pregnancy.

Best time of year to drink this: Autumn and winter

Best time of day to drink this: Morning and evening

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!

Flavour: Blackcurrant Beauty

Description: ‘Deliciously deep purple organic fruits to help you glow inside and out – good news for wrapping yourself and your skin in pure velvet.’

Ingredients: Rosehip, hibiscus flower, licorice root, fennel seed, orange peel, beetroot, blackcurrant fruit (4%), natural blackcurrant flavour (4%), orange essential oil flavour.

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 99.9%

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 20

Our Review: Beetroot and blackcurrant must have become trendy at some point, because this blend and Twinings’ Intensely Beetroot Burst came on the market at pretty much the same time.  So, we can’t help but compare the two.

Where the Twinings offering smelled earthy, Pukka’s blend smells like hot Ribena.  It’s sickly sweet, like candy floss.

However, the flavour is anything but.  No matter how long you leave it to brew, the taste is mostly hot water, though there is a mild blackcurrant aftertaste.  You can only just taste the beetroot; it mostly tempers the faint sweetness of the berries, licorice and fennel.

We can’t understand why the other ingredients are even on the list.  You can’t taste them.  With hibiscus at the top of the list, you’d expect some kind of tartness, but it’s not really there.

All in all, this is an uninspiring blend that could be described as very mild fennel, a hint of earthiness, and a somewhat sweet aftertaste.  We think Pukka tried to do too much, with this one.  All those different ingredients cancel each other out.  If you’re looking for a beetroot infusion, definitely go for the Twinings option instead.

Best time of year to drink this: No particular season

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoons, simply because we would recommend the Twinings option with lunch

Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to our blog so you don’t miss out on tea reviews, new flavour announcements, recommended tea accessories, and much more!