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The leaves for this tea smell absolutely wonderful, light and green, and the tea I brewed from them had the same lovely scent. I was terribly disappointed to take a sip and discover that there was nothing there to taste at all. There was enough green that I was sure I’d actually picked up the tea and not a cup of hot water, but no citrus at all and hardly any tea.

Now, to be fair, I strongly suspect that I’ve kept this tea too long — I discovered the unopened tin recently, and I’m not sure when I acquired it. It’s possible that the flavor was lost before the scent. If it can be made to taste anything like it smells, I would like to try this one again.

This is the comfort tea that I want when it is the middle of the night and I just don’t feel good. I want to put on a robe and slippers and stumble into the kitchen to light up the burner under the kettle so that I can sit in the dark watching the gas light while the water boils. I want to add a generous spoonful of honey and take my mug of tea (teabag and spoon and all) back to bed where I can curl up and drink my tea from the spoon until it’s cool enough to sip directly from the mug. I want this tea, specifically, in this teabag that’s going to be stuck to the side of the mug when I wake up in the morning feeling better because I finally got some sleep. This is my comfort tea.

This is an incredibly sweet tea that just knocks you over with fruit. (I’m not surprised that it’s very often one of the sample teas that Teavana sets out in its stores.) If you’re really sure that you want a sweet, sweet tea, this one is absolutely worth the trouble of picking those little fragments of rooibos leaf out of your tea strainer.

This is a sweet and very tasty black tea. With no sugar, there’s a faint bite of black tea bitter to balance the sweetness; with one lump, it’s more of a decadent experience. This is a very smooth tea, but it’s a little more complicated in its flavors than I usually choose first thing in the morning. It makes a great mid-morning treat.

The Tea Table calls this a “holiday” tea, but hastens to assure that it’s “delicious any time of year”, which I find amusing. This tastes very much like a mid-winter tea to me. This is also from my tea-of-the-month subscription and I don’t think it’ll last me through the month, let alone through the winter, at the rate I keep drinking it!

This is an amazingly smooth black tea: it has no bitter taste or aftertaste at all, and with one lump of sugar is sweet without being heavy. Even when I accidentally oversteep — for example, I left the leaves in for almost a quarter of an hour this morning from a combination of natural forgetfulness and pre-caffeination — this tea does not retaliate. It’s an excellent first cup of tea for the day.

The website for this tea — or what I presume is this tea, as I have an older gift tin in a decidedly different color scheme — informs me that I may have to order this tea directly from London once I finish this tin, which is sad news indeed for an American.

This is the first green tea which I’ve tried from my tea of the month subscription to Tea Table. The label on my packet claims that this is “the perfect basic green tea” and, while I’m not sure that it’s perfect, it is a very nice basic tea. It’s surprisingly smooth for a green tea, even in the dregs when the taste becomes slightly bitter, and until those dregs the taste is very light and pleasing.

The company’s webpage for this tea drops the “basic” from the description and makes this sound like a far more complicated tea than I experienced. Don’t let that put you off.