Brand:

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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Brand:

Flavour: Summer

Ingredients: Apple (45%), hibiscus (27%), rosehip (10%), beetroot, sweet blackberry leaves, strawberry pieces (2%), blackberries, raspberries, flavouring (strawberry, raspberry, blackberry), safflower petals

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £11 for 125g

Review: Looking at those ingredients…you know what to expect. It smells sweet and fruity, and a bit beetrooty. The first sip is like your totally average hibiscus tea, with a hint of beetroot…and then you swallow it and all the flavour just disappears. The overriding tasting note is water, no matter how long you brew it. It’s pointless, especially for that price tag.

Best time of year to drink this: Summer, they claim, but why bother?

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon?

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Flavour: Tropical Burst

Ingredients: Dried apple pieces, hibiscus, candied mango (10%), candied papaya, rosehip peels, beetroot, natural flavourings, fig and acai bits (acai, apple, apple juice, citric acid, rice flour)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £10

Tin Size: 125g

Our Review: Another truly bizarre, unnecessarily imaginative list of ingredients. It smells very strongly of fruit, and the taste is way too sweet for us. It overrides all other flavours, like someone lumped in buckets of sugar. That said, it is tropical, so if you are the type to add loads of sugar to your tea, this might be for you, as an after-meal treat. But we couldn’t have more than one sip because it was just so sickly.

Best time of year to drink this: Summer?

Best time of day to drink this: After a full meal, like lunch or dinner

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Flavour: Moringa Passion Fruit

Ingredients: Apple bits, raisins, carrots, beetroot, candied pineapple, candied papaya, natural flavouring, moringa leaves (2%), lemon peel

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £10

Tin Size: 125g

Our Review: Hmmm…. It smells acidic…with maybe some papaya, and a background hint of beetroot. The mix is not appealing. The flavour, then, is your average fruit tea, as if it has hibiscus, even though it’s not in there. Then it changes. We get a bit of an earthy undertone…and watery vegetables. It’s okay, but it doesn’t really blend well. It’s just…odd. Who ever thought candied fruit would go well with beetroot and carrots?? (The Tea People, obviously, but you know….) So it’s not terrible, but we wouldn’t personally buy such a big tin of such a blend.

Best time of year to drink this: No idea, really – it’s an odd one

Best time of day to drink this: Again, no real idea

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Brand:

Flavour: Amalfi Lavender Limoncello

Ingredients: Green tea, apple, sweet blackberry leaves, beetroot, lavender, lemongrass, silver lime flowers, natural flavouring, lemon peel, marigold flower petals

Caffeine Factor: Caffeinated

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: See website for subscription options

Bags Per Box: See website for subscription options

Review: This smells really lemony! Just like sherbet. It tastes like it too – it’s that fake lemon flavour you always get from lemongrass…and absolutely nothing else. Beetroot? Where!? We dare anyone to tell us they can identify that when drinking this blend. It’s just cleaning product. It’s a fancy ingredients list in fancy packaging with a completely un-fancy taste for a high price tag. It’s an AVOID.

Best time of year to drink this: Never!

Best time of day to drink this: Never

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Brand:

Flavour: Peach & Rhubarb

Ingredients: Apple pieces, hibiscus, rosehip, natural flavourings, sweet blackberry leaves, red beetroot, citric acid

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2.20

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: Just stop, stop, stop putting peach flavouring into tea blends – stop it! It’s always awful. It always comes out fake tasting, no matter how ‘natural’ it is. Rhubarb – same advice. And stop telling us it’s peach and rhubarb tea when it’s just hibiscus, apple, rosehips and sweet blackberry leaves…AGAIN. There must be a hundred thousand of these on the market. Can we please do something different!?

The smell of this one is overpoweringly artificial and sweet. The flavour is similar – but pretty much all peach. We couldn’t taste the rhubarb at all. Who even knows what the beetroot is doing in there! Then there is a horrible after-taste of citric acid – an after-sourness, if you will. If you have to try that hard to create the taste you’re aiming for, it’s not worth doing. Go make something genuinely herbal.

This is an AVOID.

Best time of year to drink this: Never

Best time of day to drink this: Never

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Brand:

Flavour: Superfruity

Ingredients: Hibiscus (49%), rosehips (20%), beetroot (19%), blackcurrant, raspberry and blueberry flavourings (7%), apple, blueberry (1%), orange peel, elderberry, safflower

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £3.49

Bags Per Box: 12

Review: It’s always fun when we’re slightly divided in opinion

Although boasting that it will be ‘superfruity’, this one is heavy on the beetroot. Ginger loves Beetroot, while Tulsi isn’t a fan. Thankfully for all those like Tulsi, Twinings balanced out the beetroot with berries, making for a more complex blend.

On first brew, it’s a deep, vibrant purple, due to both the beetroot and the blackcurrant. The smell is predominantly blackcurrant – like hot Ribena, but with a hint of tart hibiscus.

That tartness is much stronger than expected, when you drink it – and it’s sweeter than anticipated. The blueberry really stands out, here. Finally, you get that beetroot aftertaste. It is a blend that moves through stages as it moves through your throat.

If you’re looking for a fruit tea, this is probably the best one out there at the moment. It’s far more substantial than any others we’ve tried (and we’ve tried a lot); and if you’re not so keen on that beetroot taste, it gets sweeter and tarter as it cools.

If you want more of the beetroot and a milder hit of the berry, we suggest their Beetroot Burst blend, which Ginger prefers (although she did enjoy this one too).

Best time of year to drink this: Summer

Best time of day to drink this: After lunch – it’s so strong that you wouldn’t want to have anything else after it

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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

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Flavour: Intensely Beetroot Burst

Ingredients: Beetroot (75%), blackcurrant leaves (24%), natural blackcurrant flavouring with other natural flavourings (1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £2.49

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: We don’t understand the use of an adverb (‘intensely’) to describe a noun phrase (‘beetroot burst’); and strangely, this blend apparently contains 2 calories per cup.

That said, this is an interesting one.  It smells very much of beetroot, with a sweet blackcurrant under…current (no pun intended), and the taste is similar.  It’s quite earthy, much like the root vegetable, though a bit milder because of the inclusion of berries.

This is one of those ‘Marmite’ blends: you either love it or you hate it.  Three Tulsi doesn’t really like either beetroot or blackcurrant (albeit the blackcurrant isn’t very strong), so she doesn’t like this tea.  Ginger Tea, on the other hand, says this is one of her favourites.

And if you do like beetroot, you’ll get some great health benefits from this brew, as beetroot is a good source of folate and iron (both of which are essential in pregnancy), as well as nitrates, betaine, magnesium and many antioxidants.  For all these reasons, we’re marking this a ‘must-have tea’, with the proviso that it won’t suit all tastes.

Best time of year to drink this: This a good all-year-rounder

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoons – Ginger Tea likes to have this one with lunch

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Flavour: Twinkle Berry

Ingredients: Apple, Hibiscus, Beetroot, Raspberry, Safflower Petals, Flavour, Cornflower Petals

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: 100%

Price Range: £7.50

Cups Per Box: 40 (approx.)

Review: It smells like cherry cough syrup, but milder.  We think they’re aiming for cherry pie, but it tastes a bit watery, even when left to brew for several minutes.  It’s also a bit artificial in flavour.  T2 suggest trying it chilled, so we left it in the fridge overnight and tried it again.  It didn’t improve things.  If anything, it just tasted like flavoured water.  It’s a pointless tea that isn’t worth the high price tag.  If you’re looking for a mild berry tea, you’re better off buying Sainsbury’s Blueberry & Blackberry.

Best time of year to drink this: Autumn / winter.

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon / evening.

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