Forest Fruits Tea – Kent & Sussex Tea & Coffee Co.

Tea hasn't really been on my mind much this week as I've been suffering from a bad headache which made drinking anything but water or something mild like Milk Oolong pretty much unbearable. However, I'm now fully recovered and back to my old tea-swigging ways and I really need to get on and do some reviews.

I have a lot of tea to get through as I seem to have collected rather a lot over the last few months (I was quite shocked when I returned from holiday to see how many packets of tea I actually have waiting to test — I guess they have been steadily building up so I hadn't noticed but suddenly seeing them all together was quite an eye-opener). 

Having so many different teas can make my tea tasting quite tricky as I have so many new flavours to try that I can't decide which one I should go for first. This often means that I get overwhelmed, particularly if I don't have a lot of time, and so I give up and revert to old favourites (Milk Oolong (of course), Garden of England and Apricot).

However, today I have valiantly managed to stop myself from going down the usual path and am able to offer up a review of Forest Fruits Tea by Kent & Sussex Tea & Coffee Co., which is one of their fruit flavoured teas (I have no idea why this is called a tea rather than a tisane like the rest of their fruit range, especially when they refer to it as such in their description — colour me confused).

Ingredients: sultanas, hibiscus blossoms, elderberries, natural flavouring, freeze dried whole blackberries, whole raspberry pieces and strawberry pieces, blueberries and blackcurrants.

They describe it thus:

“Our Forest Fruits Tea is a real intense berry experience and a real pleasure to drink. This is a real fruit tisane packed with lots of different fruits and berries. The light tangy notes of the berries combine perfectly with the pieces of fruit to create a fascinating tisane with many lovely sweet nuances.”

I received a sample of this tea with one of my orders and was interested to try it. It has a wonderful bright red colour (a good thing in my book) and smells every bit as good as it tastes – it’s a super berry explosion!

The tea has a beautifully rounded fruity taste with just a hint of tartness although, as ever for me, a teaspoon of demerara brought out its true flavour.

As I think I mentioned in a previous blog, the first time I made a mug of this I completely forgot about it as I was watching TV, and by the time I remembered it was cold. This wasn’t a problem as the tea tastes equally good warm or cold and leaving it to steep just increases the flavour. It was also perfect for easing me back into tea drinking after my headache this week. 

This tea would make for a lovely, comforting mug on a late Autumn or early Winter evening —  it has no caffeine so can be quite happily drunk at any time of the day. I also think it would make for a nice chilled version (maybe even sparkling) on a hot summer’s day but unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting many more of those so I shall have to wait until next year to find that out.

This is definitely a tea I will be happy to get more of and I’m quite disappointed that my sample has all gone as I wouldn’t have minded having another couple of mugs of it.

But on the bright side, it means one tea down and only another 72 still to taste.

THIS WEEK’S DEALS

Kent & Sussex Tea & Coffee Co. are having their usual weekend offer with 10% off all their stock and a free sample of one of their Nepalese teas with the code NEPAL. According to their blog, various factors have caused a recent shortage of Darjeeling, but with tea production in Nepal increasing these can be seen as a serious contender.

The offer is on until midnight on Sunday.

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I did get rather excited the other day as I thought I had found somewhere selling tea at 25% off, but then realised that it said 'Tee' — and it was a T-shirt site. Not quite what I was hoping for!