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Oh. My. God.

I’ve tried this tea from my HP potions sampler a few times and in a few different ways by now, but have yet to review it and I’m not sure why. Possibly because I usually only post one or two of the teas I have each day, and there are others I’ve had more to say about than this one. Today, though, this was the unquestionable star of my tea menu.

I made little melt-in-the-middle chocolate puddings for myself and a flatmate a couple of days ago, and bought a small pot of double cream to go with them. We finished most of it at the time, but there was a little left which I decided to add to tea. This was the first one I had this way, as I’ve often thought upon drinking it that it would go great with some cream (next on my list is coconut). It was so great that I broke my caffeine curfew for an extra cup.

The usual flavours of caramel and vanilla are present, and the cream flavour (which was already present) is merely enhanced and makes me forget that I am not actually sitting in the Leaky Cauldron drinking a real butterbeer, as it thickens it up and is almost exactly how I imagined it in the books. The aroma is amazing, and made my whole flat smell like a bakery. Drank with cream, this could totally replace dessert and actually con your stomach into thinking it’s had some.

Despite my complete awe at the even better than usual taste of this tea with cream added, my usual thoughts of ‘this should really have some rum flavouring to it’ are not diminished, if not heightened. At the moment, it is a wonderful “virgin” tea, but I always pictured butterbeer to have an alcoholic flavour without actually containing alcohol, and I think that this would make it taste more authentic. I still have around 1/4 of a shot of rum in a tiny bottle from when I was sick and used it to make a hot toddy, and I may just be tempted to make an exception to my no alcohol rule to try this theory out. There’s barely anything left, after all…

Maybe I should send some of this tea to the guys at the Harry Potter Studio Tours, with instructions to add a splash of cream, as this was better than the ‘real’ butterbeer that I drank there! I will note, however, that this was incredibly sweet and cloying, and I would not recommend it to people that aren’t big on dessert teas. I would also say that a small cup should be enough, as I feel a whole mugful would be too rich.

When I had the Sweet & Spicy tea from Good Earth earlier, I got some hot water from the coffee shop to drink it with. They wouldn’t give me it by itself, so I bought this tea and asked for the bag separately, hoping to keep it for later. Unfortunately, the guy opened the little sachet so I couldn’t keep it and had to drink it today.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did the last time I had this tea, possibly because it was in the little pocket bit of my bag for an hour or two, which I suspect might have had an affect on the weaker flavour. The ginseng was still prominent, but this time around the raspberry wasn’t as strong and the fruity taste was definitely diminished.

Still a good tea, but not as great as I remembered.

This is going to be a hard tea to review. But first, I’d like to say that my Hapa-tite tea swap from Hapatite arrived today! Well, yesterday, but I only got it today. I am so excited!! All of the teas look very interesting, and I can’t wait to try them all.

I had arranged to go out for coffee with my partner before the swap package arrived, but wanted to stay in and drink tea instead, so as a compromise I picked this bag out and went for coffee with him, and asked for hot water at the shop.

Like Nicole stated in her review, I wish I’d read the recommendations on here before making this tea! A short steep would definitely have been enough, but as it is, I left the bag in the water for a good 4 or 5 minutes. I had a sugar sachet ready which I definitely did not need, as it was overpoweringly sweet, and actually probably the first tea I’ve had which had lived up to its ‘sweet’ promise. The cinnamon taste is also very powerful, and tiny sips reminded me of cinnamon fireball sweets I ate as a child. However, if you drink this is anything larger than little sips, the flavour becomes seriously strong. I could not believe just how strong it was. By the end of the cup (which wasn’t even that big) my lips were tingling and the inside of my mouth was on fire. This is a seriously intense brew.

I have a feeling it would have been nice had I steeped it only for a short time, and I actually put the teabag in a cup of iced water to see what that would do. The result was a pretty tasty, mild, crisp version of the hot cup I’d just drank. I didn’t think there would be much flavour to it but the same flavours were obviously present, which was good. In the second/cold steep, the sweetness was more apparent than the cinnamon, instead of the other way around, which was definitely better for me. I could also taste the orange a bit this time, which was completely lost in the cinnamon first steep. It’s worth noting that there wasn’t even a hint of black tea in either steep.

I really don’t know how to rate this tea, because if I’d just had the iced version, I would have rated it better than average. However I struggled to finish the first cup so much I actually started to think I was having an allergic reaction because my mouth was burning so bad. I usually go with the rating based on my best experience with the tea, but this time I feel like I have to take the first steep into account. I think it’s going to have to be half way between the two.

Thanks for the try, Nicole! Sipdown.

I got these teabags for Christmas from my amazing parents who know me too well. I always loved liquorice root as a kid, and this tea sounded amazing.

It smells really good brewed, mainly peppermint with a liquorice background, and that’s how it tastes, too. The peppermint comes through strongly first, then lets the liquorice root come into play a bit more, giving a nice natural liquorice flavour instead of a taste of the mass-produced sweet. However liquorice root is very sweet, and the aftertaste of this is just too sweet for me unfortunately (and I like my teas fairly sweet, too). It hasn’t stopped me from getting through the majority of my teabags already, as it’s the only negative to a good herbal.

I got around it, though! Tonight, I fancied a hot chocolate with a twist, and, whilst I would normally go for a chocolate chai latte, I fancied mint. Sooo, I brewed a cup of this, and added it to cocoa instead of plain water and BAMFT! mint hot chocolate! It’s goooorgeous, and the sweetness means no added sugar! Plus the liquorice aftertaste is still present, giving it a more sophisticated twist. Yummy.

YES. I like this.

I had been craving a fruity iced tea all day, so around 11 this morning I put a few spoons of this in some iced water to cold brew. Warm, I couldn’t taste any of the fruity flavours in this and it just seemed like a decent enough black tea, so I wasn’t too hopeful for the results of my cold brew.

I am pleased to report, however, that the cold brew really lets the flavours shine, and I am really impressed with the results. Predominantly grapefruit with a suggestion of blood orange and the black tea base complement the citrus flavour, this is SO much better iced! This will be perfect for the summer, I can imagine it will be perfectly refreshing.

I ordered this from Caffé Nero today as I went quite late on, and didn’t want to have something caffeinated. This was a welcome surprise – a bit on the tart side, the raspberries enter the sip first, with the ginseng playing around the background. The flavours meld beautifully together, and I’m not even sure I’ve had ginseng before but it is a flavour that I recognised and reminded me of something that I still can’t place. Nevertheless, this makes for a beautiful cup, and a new favourite flavour which I can add to my list. I LOVE ginseng! Or at least I think I do… This calls for more research.

Today is not a day for new teas. Today is a day for tried and tested, I know I love this tea teas.

I got a notice yesterday saying that my water would be turned off today at 11am to deal with a burst pipe. Naturally, I panicked, then decided to get up early, have a shower and then fill any and all receptacles I could find with water. That didn’t work out. I woke up this morning at 10:58am, flew out of bed and managed to fill two water bottles before the water was turned off. So I have exactly one litre of water to last me the entire day D:

On the plus side, the kettle already had enough water in for a morning mug of tea.

Because I am limited by the amount I can drink (and only have 3 infusers, which I have no way of washing out) I decided to stick to teas that I know I’ll enjoy today, so I went for this as a creamy favourite.

Toasty and sweet, this was the perfect choice to calm me down after my panic this morning. I only have a couple of cups of this left, but might have to sneak another sample into my next order (which I have already selected as adagio). I will be very sorry to see this go. I added milk and sugar this morning, and I wish I’d left the sugar out. It’s too sweet, as the coconut is a sweet enough flavour on its own. However, the added sweetness reminds me of coconut icecream – which I am now craving despite the rain – and I have a feeling this would make an awesome tea latte. I like it too much to sacrifice double the tea for one drink at the minute, but when I have more I will definitely have to test that theory out.

FYI: I freaking love coconut. Especially coconut teas. This may cloud my judgement. But this tea is awesome.

I didn’t post anything at all yesterday I’m so sorry! I try to post at least one note a day, which isn’t much considering I usually drink at least three different teas in a day (four yesterday) and I still didn’t manage to get anything posted. I’d like to say I was super busy, but really I just forgot.

So, backlog from yesterday. I had this again last night, but in a larger mug so I added an extra teaspoon. I also let it steep for almost half an hour as I forgot about it.

I don’t know which element caused it to change so drastically, but this time the smell was less bowl of fruit and more metallic coins. I found this really off putting, but the strawberry smell was still present in the background so I held out hope.

Nope.

Even though it had steeped for so long, I could still taste tap water, with an added taste of sucking on a coin. There’s a vague strawberry taste behind the coppery awfulness, but it does not dominate as it did last time. This really disappointed me, as I seriously loved it then, and I hope future brews work out more like the first one. It’s also extremely tart, and I have a feeling the hibiscus may have gotten the better of this cup. Like I said in my previous review, the dry mix of fruit etc. is so varied and chunky that it’s hard to get the same thing in two spoonfuls, and I definitely had more hibiscus and less strawberry this time around. The longer I drink it, however, the more the strawberry comes out, so it’s not so bad.

If this was my first cup, I would have rated it somewhere around the 38 mark and left it untouched in my cupboard for months. I’m not going to change the rating, though, as I use it to reflect the best a drink can be, and always use how I best enjoyed it to give my rating.

This is my first time posting from the main website on a computer instead of my phone! :O Maybe I should do it more often, it’s so much easier!

I’ve had these teabags lying around my cupboard for a while now, probably verging on 10 months, so I thought I should try to get them used up (and then buy more tea. Yay!) I bought them from my on-site campus shop last year as I wanted a caffeine-free tea, and it was either this or chamomile, which I don’t much care for. I remember thinking that it tasted like regular tea, only with an odd aftertase, and haven’t had plain rooibos since, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.

My first mug of this, drank plain, was quite disappointing. It was very bland, with only a little flavour that I could make out at all, and not enough to tell what it was. Maybe the teabags have lost their potency over time.

I am curently drinking my second mug of the night, which I brewed using two teabags for twice as long. This seems to have helped, as the flavour is more present this time around even though I added milk to make it more soothing. Brewed, the smell reminds me of honey, and I expected it to taste like regular tea does with a spoonful of honey stirred in. The actual flavour is more woodsy than I expected from the smell, but commonplace in other rooibos drinks I own. It is a very suitable bedtime drink, with a deep, woodsy taste in the sip, and a floral honey (I knew I smelled it!) aftertaste which I find very soothing.

Now that my collection has vastly expanded, I own many rooibos blends which I would choose over this in a heartbeat. Having said that, it will not be a chore to finish the remaining teabags.

My latest Bluebird order arrived today and I’ve already tried all of them! Apart from the sample, which was of a tea that I already have so I suppose it doesn’t count. This was the last one I tried, as my bedtime drink to replace the Berry Blues from Adagio that I finished last week.

The dry mix is overwhelming strawberry. It smells very strong, and reminds me of a block of jelly/jello before you add the hot water to it. This tea looks AMAZING in the bag, it’s so pretty with huge chunks of strawberry and other fruits, and sunflower petals. I’m kinda sad that I bought this so early in the year, it just makes me wish it was summer already to look at it. It also makes it kinda difficult to get an equal amount of ingredients in each spoonful though, so that could be a downside. It could also be a plus, though, as I can’t really get bored of a tea which is slightly different each time. Steeped, it turns a deep reddish colour, which I was a little surprised at, thinking it was going to be a pale infusion. On second thoughts, the colour is probably down to the hibiscus. The smell is also insane – exactly like jelly once you’ve added the hot water! Which is very fitting considering the smell beforehand. Still so so strawberry.

I have read a couple of reviews of this tea that noted a lack of strawberry flavour, but I honestly have no idea where they got that from! Maybe Bluebird changed their recipe? Whatever the reason, my first sip is pure strawberry jam. Like, it’s as if I have just dipped a spoon in strawberry jam and shoved it right in my mouth. A little tart, but nowhere near as much as I had expected considering the lemonade aspect, and actually I can’t taste or smell the lemons at all. Regardless, it is a lovely hot fruity tea.

I added a spoon of sugar to compare with the berry blues tea I used to drink (which needed two, because hibiscus) and it instantly becomes super sweet. Now, it actually tastes like strawberry jelly! But hot, and liquid… Still no sign of the citrus aspect, which is disappointing, but this is an amazing strawberry tea. I have a feeling it would also be great iced in the summer, and that this might bring out the ‘lemonade’ more. Maybe I just got a disproportionate amount of strawberry in this cup? I’ll have to wait and see.

Not my favourite fruit tea – Berry Blues is a tough act to follow – but a close second, and one which I will be happy to drink as a replacement.