Teekanne

Ugh. This is just bad bad bad. It smells and tastes overwhelmingly of fake strawberry flavor. The lemongrass doesn’t come through at all and what small green tea flavor peeks out is of poor quality. I barely choked this down. I would have poured it out but didn’t want to waste the caffeine.

This is great. Love how strong each bag is. Also love the flexibility of the steep time.

The ass-kicker of all peppermint teas, and one of those longest in production. This tea has been around long before World Wars and our grandparents. Its a moroccan style mint tea— in other words it can be brewed as strong as coffee and sweetened to the point that it would keep any dentist in business.

You may opt to brew it long or short, and its mintiness will expand or dimish accordingly. I generally find one tea bag strong enough to make a full liter of tea.

Medicinally-speaking this tea is wonderful for an upset stomach and will even mildly numb a toothache, there’s that much peppermint oil in the infusion. I use it as an oncoming cold remedy, and even herbalist medicine says ‘it works!’

Not bad for a tea that combines lemongrass with mint. I expected it wouldn’t be very good, because it seems so easy for lemongrass teas to go wrong, and mint teas often taste pretty bad. The use of spearmint keeps it fresh, and the lemony flavours keep it from tasting too leafy. Light, fresh, upbeat.

This tastes slightly better than the average peppermint tea, but it basically tastes like every other peppermint tea—not that good. It also has a gross soapy element at the end of the mouthful. No wonder I’ve drnk barely any of this box of tea.

Fora supermarket quality herbal tea, this is unexpectedly delicious! Maybe I just like it so much because when I was growing up, I drank a lot of blackcurrant and apple juice, and Ribena. I don’t know, but it tastes really good to me. It’s a lot like what you’d probably expect less sweet, hot apple and blackcurrant juice to taste like. That maybe doesn’t sound so good, but this is yummy.

Hmm, I don’t think very much of this. The tea has a weird aftertaste and the apple flavour is just too full-on or something. It’s really acidic and has this subtle element in the flavour that tastes somehow vaguely ashy to me. I wouldn’t get it again.

Not that much going on flavour-wise, but perhaps a little bit more dimensional than Teekanne’s Spanish Orange, especially at the end of the mouthful. It’s very sour (even with sweetener), and as you might anticipate if you’ve had oranges and blood oranges before, the flavour is less obviously orange-y.

As with a lot of other herbal teas, the flavour of this is kind of one dimensional. It has a nice acidic tang at the end of the mouthful, and in general kind of just tastes like orange cordial.

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As I said for “Sternenmarkt” (Teekanne) I love seasonly teas, this is very strong, I tasted it with Denmark butter cookies and even if I found it a little hard to finish, it kept me a good company during cold days :)

I love seasonal teas, I added just a teaspoon of honey to sweeten a little bit, but it was perfect with gingerbread bisctuits :) Thanks to Eva for sending me this lovely tea from Germany!

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Well, that’s the last one of my tea bags of Pomegranate Delight. I wasn’t that impressed when I first tasted it, but somehow this tea grew on me. I like the fact that it’s mild, so I can drink it even late at night when I’m tired and feeling cold.

This is a nice tea. It’s got hibiscus, apple, blueberry and vanilla flavours, orange peel, blackberry leaves, and elderberries. It tastes like blueberry with a bit of vanilla, mostly, I don’t taste any orange, and I only taste apple in that it gives that sense of sweet, non-specific fruitiness. This tea goes well with a bit of sweetener and a bowl of cashews and berries.

I may not be the best judge, really—I don’t like mint tea. I gave this a try because the combination of fresh mint and fresh lemon really appeals to me and so I thought this tea would, too. Not really! You can’t taste much lemon and it’s pretty much just that boring, bitter leaf mint tea taste as per usual. I still drink it sometimes because it helps when I have indigestion, but I wouldn’t buy it for enjoyment purposes.

I drank this for the first time in a while today, and it makes me feel I may end up rethinking my opinions on some of the sweeter supermarket teas I’ve got. I thought they were the bomb, but after tasting the complexity and the dimension of other teas, such as the Kusmi teas I’ve been drinking for a while now, I have kind of a different take. I like this tea for the fact that it’s simple, inoffensive, and with a bit of sweetener (there’s a really fine line in this case between a bit and too much, though—enough to slightly reduce the sourness and bring out the flavour, but not enough to make the resemblance to raspberry candy, cordial, or drink syrup unavoidable) is a nice fruity companion to a snack. I like to drink this simple, pleasing tea with a plate of cashews and fresh berries. Sometimes simplicity can also be a drawback, though. I think that’s the case here. The simpleness of the tea wouldn’t be a problem were the flavour not so cloying at times, though.

Like real berries, it has a little tartness and has a tiny bit of its own sweetness, but upon reconsidering it, I think the fruity flavour (just fruity—the vanilla element of the tea is wholly imperceptible to me) is actually too assertive for its lack of dimension. It’s a bit like the raspberry tea equivalent of Ribena drink (I always loved that, but you can’t deny that it’s pretty full-on, and without enough dilution can be cloying). Its flavour doesn’t have the flavour nuances of real fruit, and every sip and part thereof pretty much gives you a one-note flavour. Maybe I’ve just tired of it now that I’m on to my second box (in eight months, though), but I just can’t feel the enthusiasm I had for it before, so I’m going to put the rating down a bit.

I think this tea could improve by either being mixed with a plain black tea and used as an iced tea, or served with some fresh mint and lime juice and zest. I’m on my last bag of it, though, and now that I’ve reconsidered my perspective on it, instead of rebuying it, I’m going to go for something new and unrelated.

I feel a bit crap now that I’ve started getting into caffeinated teas and walked away from my herbal tea habit, because now that I’ve had these more expensive Kusmi teas and other teas with the tea leaf in them, I’ve found no herbal tea really has that body to it. This is annoying, because I really can’t drink much caffeine and I’d like to be able to enjoy tea at any time of the day. I might try to give rooibos more attention in future or something.

Also, just so that you know: I read a little while ago that apparently some herbal teas can be as bad for your teeth as acidic drinks like juice and soda. In case you hadn’t noticed, some of them have citric acid in them (including this one, and it’s obvious), so if you don’t drink water after drinking your herbal tea, it might be something you should consider doing in future.

This is one of my favourites of the herbal teas I’ve gotten in Germany. I can’t think of much to say on it at the moment. If you like lime, you’ll like this! I drink it hot with sweetener.

I added this tea just so I could express my disappointment in it. Even though I found it unpleasant the first time, I tried it again to make sure, because I didn’t want to throw out a whole packet of tea unnecessarily. It went in the bin after the second try.

I don’t know what went wrong with this tea. The ingredients make it seem so good, but it just has a grating, boozy flavour that tastes like spiced rum gone wrong or something. The flavour was something I’d have to choke down. It was without a doubt the worst tea I’ve ever had, which really surprised me, because I own something like 15 other boxes of Teekanne tea, and not one of them ever disappointed me before this. I had it with sweetener and no milk. There’s a chance milk could improve the flavour, but it’s just so bad that I don’t even think so. I think the problem is that they tried to do too many things at once—orange, every Christmas-sy spice at once, vanilla, chicory. The chicory could well be the problem, since I don’t really know what it tastes like. They should reformulate this, perhaps with fewer spices, no chicory, and a rooibos base. Not recommended!

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I tend to not be a fan of vanilla-flavored bag teas, but this one is passable. Even though chamomile is the first ingredient on the list, I think it works (if you’re a chamomile hater you’ll probably want to stay away). I’m a little turned off by the idea of the “Natural Honey Flavor” and “Natural Vanilla Flavor” that are also listed. Overall: drinkable, but I wouldn’t buy it.