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Flavour: Autumn

Ingredients: Rooibos (28%), cocoa husk, ginger root (15%), apple pomace (12%), cinnamon pieces (10%), citric acid, flavouring (macadamia, brittle, roasted almond, cheesecake, hazelnut), sunflower petals, safflower petals

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £11 for 125g

Review: Unsurprisingly, this smells and tastes really fake. It goes through two phases. First you get the natural ingredients, and they’re quite pleasant. Then you get the flavouring, and it just lingers. It’s this indistinguishable sweet flavour that hangs around for a party and dehydrates you. Why why why throw in all that flavouring? Especially for that price tag! Cut all that out and this could have been really nice. Someone will probably like it, but for us, it’s a no.

Best time of year to drink this: Autumn, they say

Best time of day to drink this: After a meal – it’s definitely a dessert drink

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Flavour: Celebration Gin Twist

Ingredients: Ginger cubes (sugar, ginger, citric acid), apple pieces, ginger pieces, juniper berries, acidifed apple pieces (apple, citric acid), cucumber slices, freeze-dried lemon peel, lemongrass, flavouring

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £7 for 20 bags

Review: Cucumber slices, in a tea? Yes! And you can really see them! Just as the name promises, it smells and tastes just like non-alcoholic gin. It’s cucumbery and fresh, and even a little fiery, perhaps intended to be like quinine. It’s gin-like but milder – pleasant when had hot, but we can also imagine it being nice cold on a summer afternoon. Best of all, it stands out as different from many of the usual tea blends on the market.

Best time of year to drink this: Summer

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon

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Flavour: Blue Apple Lime

Ingredients: Dried apple pieces (28.5%), cinnamon, kaffir lime leaves (15%), blue butterfly pea flowers (15%), spearmint, lemongrass, lemon verbena, flavouring and citric acid (acidifier)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £10

Tin Size: 125g

Our Review: This one is so much fun. It smells citrusy – like lime – and it tastes like it, too! With some apple. Despite all the flowers, it’s not too floral until the aftertaste – there’s a bit of an ‘after-floral’, you could say. It has a subtle sweetness. It’s a hard one to describe – complex and distinct, interesting without being mind-boggling. It’s soothing and a good one for having in the evening, at the end of a long day. We also highly recommend adding lemon juice, which a) makes it taste even nicer and b) changes the colour from a rich bright blue to a gorgeous purply pink in your cup – magic! Just be careful not to overdo the lemon juice. We think it tastes best when the blend shifts into a kind of dark fuchsia rather than going all the way pink.

Best time of year to drink this: Spring / summer

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon or evening

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Flavour: Spiced Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients: Apple bits (apple, acidifier, citric acid), pumpkin bits (10%), carrot bits, candied papaya bits (papaya, sugar), ginger bits, flavouring, turmeric, pumpkin seeds (3.5%), bean peels, cinnamon sticks, safflower blossoms

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £10

Tin Size: 125g

Our Review: Bean peels…??? Crazy! The smell is savoury, like a curry plant rather than tea or even fruit…although there is a hint of citrusy sweetness buried deep, deep, deep underneath. The taste is very pumpkin-like, and strong on spice. So it definitely does what it says on the tin. But…is that a good thing?? It is so unusual, and not really the kind of thing you’d want to drink. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they ditched the fruit. It doesn’t quite mix with the pumpkin. The taste is so strong that it slaps you in the face. It’s sharp and tinged with artificial flavours. It’s very rich and indulgent and not something you could drink every day. We ended up throwing it away (but keeping the beautiful tin!), because we could find no one who wanted to drink it. That said…it’s so odd that someone out there might actually enjoy it in a way that we didn’t. So it’s not an avoid…but you have to be prepared for it.

Best time of year to drink this: Autumn

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: 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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Flavour: Zingy Lemon & Ginger

Ingredients: Apple pieces, ginger (1.5%), lemongrass (10%), natural flavourings, rosehip, sweet blackberry leaf, citric acid, chicory root, lemon peel (1%)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2.20

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: The smell of this is very hard to define. It’s sort of like lemon sweets – maybe lemon sherbets or lemon drizzle cake – with just a hint of ginger.

The taste is confusing. First, you’re hit with sweet apple. Then there’s a hint of lemon. Then, in the back of the throat, you get bitter chicory root. Finally, as you reach the bottom of the cup, it becomes undrinkably sweet and artificial berry flavouring lingers in your mouth.

There will be people out there who like it, but it wasn’t for us. It’s hard to know which palate this tea is aiming for. You can’t really relax into it because it’s doing too many different things that don’t blend together into one experience. And for something that calls itself Zingy Lemon & Ginger, it’s rather unforgivable that only 11.5% of the blend is actually lemon and ginger.

Best time of year to drink this: Summer

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon

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Flavour: Lemon Zinger

Ingredients: Hibiscus, rosehips, roasted chicory, orange peel, lemongrass, lemon peel and whole dried lemons, natural lemon flavour with other natural flavours and citric acid

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: As with so many lemon-flavoured blends, this one smells a bit medicinal, or like cleaning products. It’s a bit off-putting.

With such a strong scent, you’d expect strong flavour, but actually…it tastes like nothing. There’s a hit of citric acid and…that’s it, despite such a long ingredients list. It’s definitely zingy, but it’s lemonless (totally a word).

We think this is an utterly pointless flavour. We only carried on drinking it to try to figure out what to say about it, but there was nothing but that acid, and after a while, we really didn’t like the physical feeling of drinking that.

We can’t imagine this being very nice iced, either. There are far better lemon options on the market.

Best time of year to drink this: Summer, in theory – but we wouldn’t bother

Best time of day to drink this: Daytime

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Flavour: Wild Berry Zinger

Ingredients: Hibiscus, rosehips, roasted chicory, orange peel, blackberry leaves, natural flavour of black raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, red raspberries, cranberries and cherries, with other natural favours and citric acid

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: The aroma is lovely – very fruity, particularly raspberry.

The taste is surprising. We went into it expecting yet another hibiscus tea (as these fruity blends tend to be), but there’s more to this one. It’s very tart on the first sip, but as you drink on, you get a refreshing hit of real berries that doesn’t taste artificial at all. It gets better with each sip, and at the end of the cup, we wished we had more. It stands out among similar blends and we highly recommend it.

Best time of year to drink this:  Summer – maybe alongside a slice of cake!

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon

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Flavour: Country Peach Passion

Ingredients: Orange peel, rosehips, hawthorn, chamomile, natural peach flavour with other natural flavours, blackberry leaves, hibiscus, peaches, citric acid, paprika (colour)

Caffeine Factor: Caffeine-free

Organic Ingredients: Unknown

Price Range: £2-3

Bags Per Box: 20

Review: The smell of this one is very peachy…and a little artificial.  We were expecting something intensely sweet and fruity – not so.  It actually doesn’t taste much of peach at all.  In fact, it doesn’t taste much of anything.  It’s a little watery, with a fake aftertaste, and a bit of tartness in the throat that just won’t go away.  It must be the citric acid thrown into the mix.

It’s not that we hate this one.  We just wouldn’t go out of our way to buy it.  You’re better off getting another cheap, generic tart tea – especially if you live in the UK, like we do, and you can only find this one online.

Best time of year to drink this:  Summer

Best time of day to drink this: Afternoon

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