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Flavour: Time to Unwind

Ingredients: Lemon balm (43%), chamomile (18%), lime flower (3%), natural strawberry flavouring with other natural flavourings (12%), liquorice root, beetroot, vitamin B12, natural flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: Around £3.50

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: It smells like a bunch of flavouring…with a touch of fruit. The flavour isn’t too bad…because you can’t really taste anything. It’s like water…and then a hint of…something. Maybe chamomile. Yet, despite all that, there’s then an aftertaste that really lingers. This might be the addition of B12 – and flavourings. The combination strips your mouth with fakeness. All that said, we’ve had worse and can imagine someone – maybe – enjoying this. We just…no, we won’t be buying it again. There are much better alternatives out there.

Best time of year to drink this: No idea

Best time of day to drink this: Evening / night

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Flavour: Deckchair Dreaming

Ingredients: Chamomile (30%), apple pieces, rosehip, linden blossom, hibiscus, valerian (5%), orange peel, natural flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £7 for 50g

Review: Just as the blend promises, it smells mainly of chamomile and valerian, with citrusy notes. The taste is as you’d expect, too – slightly sweet chamomile, balanced out by orange peel and general tartness. The overall blend is pleasant and soothing, a lovely brew for autumn evenings. We also really like that you can see whole chamomile flowers in each bag. A highly recommended night time tea.

Best time of year to drink this: Autumn, especially

Best time of day to drink this: Evening / night

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Flavour: Gingerbread & Orange Rooibos

Ingredients: Rooibos, coriander seeds, flavouring, red pepper, pistachio, citrus peel, almond pieces

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £8 for 100g

Review: This is simply one of the best! It smells sooooo Christmassy – and it’s so exciting to see the nuts and seeds as they go into the strainer. The flavour is earthy and nutty, with a hint of spice. It’s soothing, gentle, beautiful. A little savoury due to the toasted seeds, but in perfect balance with the orange peel, making for a refreshing palate cleanser. Despite it including the dreaded ‘flavouring’, you can’t taste it at all. Best of all, it’s different from all the other blends we’ve tried. Sadly, it’s also completely off the market. Confession time: Tulsi bought this, um…ten years ago, and we only got round to drinking it now. True, it was sealed in an airtight tin all that time, but even so…the strength of the flavour after a full decade was unreal. Please, Whittard, bring this one back next Christmas! It’s a definite Must-Drink!

Best time of year to drink this: When it’s cold out – autumn / winter

Best time of day to drink this: Evenings

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Flavour: Christmas Tea

Ingredients: Rooibos, cinnamon (13%), liquorice, coriander, honeybush (6%), orange peel, cloves, black pepper, anise, dried lemon juice, star anise (3%), cardamom, roasted chicory, lime, orange oil, cinnamon oil

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £3

Bags Per Box: 17

Review: This is gorgeous. We wish we could find it all year round! It smells like herbal chai, but milder, and with a slight fruity sweetness from the orange. The flavour is soothing and warming. It’s lightly sweet but with a warm spicy after-kicky-thing…and some refreshing orange. It’s a perfect, well-balanced blend that we would have every day, if we could. We hope it comes back next winter!

Best time of year to drink this: All year round (but obviously it’s marketed for the winter)

Best time of day to drink this: Evenings – perfect for unwinding after a long day

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Flavour: Romashka

Ingredients: 100% chamomile flowers

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: 199 roubles

Bags Per Box: 20 (we think)

Review: Tulsi’s mother picked this up at a hotel in Italy. No one knows how it got there. It seems you can only buy the brand in its homeland of Russia, but we are reviewing it anyway!

Tulsi knows enough Russian to be able to read the box – and what a fantastic idea for a company: a range of teas marketed for children! Of course, adults can drink these, too. But not all herbal concoctions are suitable for infants, and this one lets you know it’s fine for babies from 1 month old. They may well be breastfeeding at that age, but at least you know that when they move on to other drinks, this tea is safe for them when they need a little something to soothe them.

You might think chamomile is chamomile – but it isn’t. This smells very flowery, and the flavour is stronger than your average chamomile tea. However, it’s not as sweet and perfumey as some varieties. Instead, it tastes like you just plucked the flowers off the plant in your garden. It might be the nicest chamomile tea we have ever tried, short of using our own flowers.

Good luck buying it anywhere outside Russia! But it really is superb and totally natural tasting, which is exactly what you want if you’re giving things to your child.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Evenings (or anytime your child gets very worked up!)

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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: Organic Hemp Tea

Ingredients: (As stated on the packaging) ‘100% organic, safe and legal cannabis full of life-enhancing cannabinoids which will not get you high or stoned’

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100% organic

Price Range: £10

Cups Per Bag: 14 (but you can re-brew up to 3 times before flavour is lost)

Review: When we got our hands on this, the packaging called it cannabis tea, but it seems to have been renamed hemp tea. It’s incredible to look at – whole flowers, buds, stems and leaves. No apparent processing; just the whole plant in a cup, steeped in boiling water. We like natural, so we really appreciated that. The instructions suggest brewing it for 20 minutes, by which point it smells strongly of CBD oil. The flavour is milder, however, and rather ‘foliagey’ (definitely a word). It’s quite pleasant to drink, although it leaves a slightly oily feeling in your mouth and dries it out a little. We don’t think this is one you drink casually – you drink it specifically for the health benefits of CBD, and as an alternative to straight CBD oil, if that taste is too strong for you. It’s obviously a good one to help you relax in the evenings.

Just to give a little more information, Body & Mind Botanicals are currently one of the UK’s only CBD manufacturers. They run their own hemp farm, to ensure the highest quality products. To learn more, you can visit their website, but their products are also available through other major retailers. The tea may look a little pricy, but all good-quality, medicinally effective CBD oil is.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Evenings

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Flavour: Pure Camomile

Ingredients: Pure camomile (100%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: Around £1.70

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: We’re not huge camomile fans, unless it’s blended with other balancing ingredients – but this is lovely. The smell is strong, floral and flavoursome. When you examine the tea bags, you can see whole flowers in there, which means you get more taste than you do with some of the other bagged camomile infusions on the market.

Tulsi’s husband summed it up as, ‘That’s rather nice.’ There isn’t much more to say than that.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Evening, when you need to wind down

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Flavour: Twinings Freshly Picked Taste of Garden Mint

Ingredients: Spearmint, natural mint flavouring with other natural flavours (8%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: Around £5

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: The aroma is summed up beautifully in the name of this infusion – it smells just like a garden. The spearmint is wakeful and gorgeously fresh. As Tulsi’s son described it, ‘The sun is upon this tea.’

The flavour didn’t let us down. Pure and refreshing, this has a strong, clean flavour that we adore. You might think spearmint is spearmint, but this really is the best we’ve tried. We recommend it all year round, and well above most other mint blends. We’re calling this a must-have tea, well worth the money.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Anytime

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Flavour: Freshly Picked Taste of Meadow Chamomile & Fennel

Ingredients: Chamomile, fennel seed (10%), natural fennel flavouring with other natural flavourings (1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: Around £5

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: This tastes exactly as it smells – like chamomile and fennel. If you like fennel, this is a good one. It’s also good if you don’t love fennel, because it’s a bit milder than straight fennel tea – while being more interesting than straight chamomile tea, which we find can be a bit too floral sometimes.

That said, is it worth the price tag? We’re not sure about that. There are probably even more natural variations on this blend out there for the same price, maybe in a loose leaf edition. However, this is a very nice infusion, especially when you need to wind down in the evening.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Evenings

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