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Flavour: Herbal Chai

Ingredients: Apple pieces, chamomile flowers, cinnamon, nettle leaves, ginger, star anise, cardamom, cloves, flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £8 for 100g

Review: It smells as expected – mainly of cloves. The taste is natural, despite the addition of flavouring. It’s your typical chai, but without the bitterness because there’s no black tea. It’s actually impressive that they manage to recreate that flavour without the tea. It’s very clove-y, but it doesn’t overpower and numb your mouth. The star anise makes it slightly sweet, so we would have this as a dessert tea. Very pleasant.

Best time of year to drink this: Autumn / winter

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon / evening / after a meal

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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: English Rose

Ingredients: Black tea, flavouring (1.5%), rose petals (1.1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £8 for 100g

Review: Although this contains a smidge of flavouring, it doesn’t taste artificial at all. The aroma is subtly rosy, and the flavour is similar. It’s not too floral or perfumy, instead like black tea but with a nice, mellow edge that removes the bitterness, and no aftertaste. It’s easy drinking in the morning or afternoon, simplistic and beautiful. An instant favourite.

Best time of year to drink this: Spring / summer

Best time of day to drink this: Morning / afternoon

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Flavour: Coconut Cream

Ingredients: Apple, cocoa husk, carob fruit, white hibiscus, sweet blackberry leaves, coconut (6%), caramel pieces, flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £8 for 100g

Review: We went into this expecting to hate it…and we weren’t disappointed. They’ve taken the generic fruit tea mix of apple, hibiscus and sweet blackberry leaves…and thrown in caramel, coconut and artificial flavouring…as if any of that goes together. It sounds disgusting, and it is disgusting. Tulsi described the smell as ‘a teenage boy’s unwashed socks’. The flavour wasn’t much better. Perhaps impressively, it manages to be worse than Sainsbury’s similar variety…which we recently declared the worst blend we’d ever tried. It’s just so sweet and overpoweringly artificial, with a strong aftertaste reminiscent of the filling in a Bounty bar…but so much grosser. We just can’t understand why anyone would pay £8 to drink this for weeks on end. For us, this was a definite AVOID.

Best time of year to drink this: NEVER

Best time of day to drink this: NEVER

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Flavour: White Chocolate

Ingredients: White tea (15%), cocoa husk (10%), white chocolate pieces, flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Dietary Notes: Contains dairy (and probably refined sugar)

Price Range: £8 for 100g

Review: We expected big things from this. When it’s 85% chocolate variations, surely it has to taste like hot cocoa. But it’s actually quite mild, and even a bit fruity at the end. We thought it was nicer than T2’s White White Cocoa (a classic we still need to review), because this one’s more chocolatey. Even so, that chocolate is subtle – pleasant and not too sweet. Ginger loved it, although Tulsi was not as keen, simply due to the flavouring. But we can see lots of people enjoying this one.

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

Best time of day to drink this: Morning / afternoon

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Flavour: Yellow Sun

Ingredients: Yellow tea (100%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £8 for 50g

Review: This is Whittard’s offering of a rare, expensive type of tea, traditionally from China. It’s made a little like green tea, but the leaves are steamed to allow for slow oxidation before then heating them to prevent further oxidation beyond the desired level. This means the flavour should not be as bitter as green tea, and it turns the tea yellowy.

We were very excited to try this, bearing in mind how special it’s meant to be. However, we weren’t blown away by this particular brand of it. The smell was strangely reminiscent of methane. Thankfully, it tasted much better than this – but it was still fairly bitter, and rather grassy, which is odd because both these things are what the slow oxidation process is meant to remove. We are certain that a more expensive variety of yellow tea is nicer. At £8 for just 50g, this was pricy but not nearly as pricy as this blend can be. If you don’t want to spend that kind of money on the higher quality stuff, we’d recommend a more standard black of green tea from the Whittard range.

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Morning / afternoon

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Flavour: Dark Chocolate Flavoured Black Tea

Ingredients: Black tea (58%), cocoa nibs (39%), flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £7.50 for 100g

Review: We have tried a lot of chocolate tea combinations, by now – so we know they don’t need to use flavouring. But this one does, and the result is that it smells like artificial caramel. The flavour is a bit nicer than the aroma – but it’s not heavy on the chocolate. Ginger liked it, but we both felt that A Tale of Two Teas’ Restricted Section blend was the nicer option for this blend. It all comes down to the flavouring – you just don’t need it, people!

Best time of year to drink this: Anytime

Best time of day to drink this: Morning / afternoon

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