Twinings of London

This is a good basic green tea. Nothing fancy, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when you don’t feel good and want tea but don’t want to waste the good stuff. I can’t really describe the flavor beyond “green tea” but it is nice and inoffensive. Also, bonus points for the fact that there are nice sized pieces of leaves in here instead of being tiny flakes like most of the other loose offerings from Twinings.

It was okay. The nutty flavors were very strong, and although I’m usually a sucker for all things nuts, this one wasn’t a favorite. I liked the orange taste very much, but they really ought to have had less of a nutty taste.

Holy cow this is delicious! Toasted coconut, creamy and sweet toasty notes, lots of buttery pastry notes, hints of cocoa. This could be called toasted coconut, and it is fabulous in the coconut indulgence part. However, I do not taste very much chocolate. I think it is better without chocolate, but since it is in the name I’ve got to dock a few points.

I enjoyed this tea more than I anticipated. Most coconut teas are overwhelmingly coconut and not much else. Some are soapy, most go off very quickly, some leave an oily residue. They can be tricky.

This tea manages to balance the coconut with the cocoa and hides the green base nicely. The coconut is very toasty and creamy (think coconut cream pie), buttery, thick, sweet. It reminded me a bit of milk oolong. The cocoa wasn’t as strong as it could have been, but I was happy with the creamy toasted coconut. It was very rich and satisfied the dessert/rich aspect I was looking for.

Word of caution: this tea is STRONG! I drink my tea clear with a bit of sugar, so the flavour is very pronounced and reveals itself after a few minutes (maybe 2 to 3 minutes) of steeping. I still really like it, but if you leave the bag in for too long it tastes worse than burnt coffee lol.

Very gentle, smooth and easy going green tea. It has no astringency nor biterness. There is a hint of sweetness in the background. I recommend this green tea for people who dislike green tea for its distinctive taste.

077/365

I heard good things about this one, so I decided to pick a box up on my last trip to the supermarket. After my disappointment with Salted Caramel, I’m glad I did – this one is so worth it! Twinings surprise me sometimes. I mean, a lot of their teas are fairly low-quality bagged affairs; very heavy on the hibiscus if they’re fruit blends, and pretty much always fannings if they’re black. I don’t mind their Everyday as exactly that – a gap filling “normal” tea that I can drink without concentrating and not feel bad about, but they’re hardly renowned for producing brilliant tea. They’re a supermarket brand, after all.

Some of their green teas are a different story, though, and sometimes it feels like they’ve concentrated all their effort on those at the expense of other parts of their line. They can still be hit and miss, but the hits (and there are some) are really worth trying. This is one of them. It absolutely nails lemon drizzle cake, beginning with a sweet lemon flavour, moving into beautiful creamy, spongy pound cake notes, and finishing up with a heavy dose of icing sugar. It’s a brilliant dessert tea, and a flavoured blend that really and truly lives up to its name. Lemon can be a hard flavour to get right – sometimes it tastes like bathroom cleaner or cough syrup, and that’s hardly desirable. Here, it manages to walk a line between artificially candy-like and too sharp/sour, resulting in a pretty perfect lemon flavour. It’s like lemon you might have baked into a cake, tempered by the sweetness it’s surrounded with, but not overpowered by it. The cake and icing sugar flavours could rival any produced by high-end boutique or gourmet brands, but what it makes me wonder is this:

If they can flavour teas like this, why aren’t they doing it all the time? There’s a lot of filler among the killer in Twining’s range, and this blend proves that they can do better than they let on. Unless it’s just a happy accident, but somehow I doubt that.

Make more teas like this one, Twinings!

Love this tea! Robust, flavorful, and really warms you from the inside.

Enjoyable but can have weird bitter green tea undertones if you over steep. Try this one iced.

This tea was even better than I expected. The lemon was delicious, but the cake flavour was unbelievable. Very creamy, buttery. It was very distinctly cake. It actually reminded me a lot of a lemon pound cake. The icing sugar, cake, butter, cream, and lemon are an amazing combo.

I really like this tea for its potent (but malty) black base. The rose is very present, floral, and quite delicious. This brews up really fast. 1.5 minutes was actually a bit too much for me, so I added soy milk. It was already lightly sweet with a very thick mouthfeel, so the creaminess of the milk was perfect.

A decent tea, but I would have liked a stronger bergamot flavor to be present. The tea feels somewhat light and almost lemony, when I would have preferred a darker take on it.