I absolutely loved the look and sound of the vanilla chai tea, but it is a loose leaf tea – which I had never had before – so whilst I was waiting to buy a tea ball thing (??!!) I tried the mulled spice tea bags first…
These tea bags are individually wrapped which I love, so handy for popping in your bag and also stops me from worrying about freshness! Not that I need to worry about that with this tea – I have nearly got through the whole tin which for me – someone who usually drinks coffee more than tea – is quite impressive!! I absolutely love this tea, as suggested on the box I do drink it sweetened (with truvia, but sugar would of course also work), and it has lovely flavours of orange and spices within it.
Of course you can’t have Christmassy tea without Christmassy treats to go with it! I have been sharing this tea with one of my friends, who is a tea lover anyway and also now adores it, and one day she brought a stollen with her to accompany it…
Well, despite having told myself that I’d wait until December 20th before visiting the Lidl Christmas section (!) this opened the floodgates and soon we were munching on lots of lebkuchen too…
These pretty much sum up the run up to Christmas for me!
We did also try the Chai tea…
It smells divine, but didn’t have as much flavour as I was hoping for. I’m thinking that was probably my fault though as there were no brewing instructions on the tin so, as the ball didn’t do a great job of keeping the tea leaf bits out of our mugs, we didn’t brew it for that long. Any advice on brewing times/techniques for loose leaf teas please??
Overall, I would definitely recommend these teas, especially the mulled spiced one – I am on the hunt for some more (my local Waitrose stocks the vanilla chai but not the mulled spice sadly) as every time someone comes round to my house for tea now I always ask them if they would like “regular tea or Christmassy?” and not surprisingly a lot of them are keen to try it, it is so good!
Have you tried either of these teas? What are your favourite types of tea? I love spicy teas and chai lattes so was really expecting to love the vanilla chai tea. I think it is just my inexperience with loose leaf teas that is the problem so any advice would be appreciated! The mulled spice tea is just divine though, I know I keep repeating myself but it just tastes (& smells!) so Christmassy! Twinings have quite a few Christmas Tea Gifts for sale this year, which all look fab, it looks like you can buy the vanilla chai as tea bags too so I may have to give them a go if I really can't get to grips with the loose tea!
Thank you Twinings for sending me these teas to review. All thoughts and opinions in this post are, of course, my own.
