Tea Reviews | It's All About The Leaf

Posts Tagged ‘blackberry leaf tea’

This has been a week fraught with multiple incidents of hamster-heart, battery-acid-in-the-veins panic. In deep need of a tea to soothe my frazzled nerves, I pawed through my stash of samples and decided Red Leaf’s Eight Herb tea might do the trick.

This herbal tea is ground fine and looks like oregano or an Italian seasoning blend. Had a nice clean smell in the packet, but I couldn’t place any of the components in my introductory sniff. But the flavors really started to pop after a good strong steep (a generous teaspoon to an 8 oz. cup, water at a good sound boil, five minutes in the cup).

I tried to guess the ingredients before I peeked at the Red Leaf website to confirm. My stressed-out palate caught the lemony taste (lemon balm) and something minty (spearmint), but I missed the rest: rosemary, linden, eucalyptus, wood betony, eleuthero, and blackberry leaf, contributing to a nice sweetness that you don’t find in many herbal combos.

Curious about the mystery ingredients, I checked out eleuthero–which is evidently an “adaptogen,” something that helps the body adapt to stress. Wood betony is a folk medicine that is purported to lower blood pressure and reduce anxiety.  Linden is believed to have a sedative effect. (Ahhhhh! Deep cleansing breath.)  I don’t know if a single cup will erase a week’s worth of scream-inducing stress, but I’m certainly enjoying the experiment.

You can purchase Red Leaf Tea Eight Herb Tea directly from their website.

“Luscious, succulent raspberries highlight this ruby red hibiscus flower infusion. Pleasantly tart and extraordinarily sweet.”

Well, that about says it all! Tea Forte has become one of my favorite go-to tea companies for robust tasting teas. So far, they have not disappointed on any of the teas I have tried, and this one is no exception.

The second I put the unique (and quite neat!) pyramid shaped tea bag into the water, a bloom of red spread throughout the water, so deeply red I had to check myself for cuts! Then the scent hit me, and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was a raspberry tea I was about to indulge in.

Forget the ingredients list, this is purely raspberry, through and through. A tangy, mildly sweet taste of raspberries straight off the vine filled my mouth at the first sip, and lingered long after I licked every drop out of the cup! If you are not a raspberry fan, then this is not for you, as there is no doubt this is all raspberry, and nothing but the raspberry!

There is not much more to say, other than, again, Tea Forte delivers. I do have to say, that it is a little high in the price range for the bagged tea, so go loose if you are going to purchase it directly from Tea Forte. For my money, this is one I would actually consider stocking the cupboard with, as I can imagine that as an iced tea, it would be just as good as it is a hot tea, and a perfect refreshing drink for a hot summers day.

You can purchase Tea Forte Raspberry Nectar directly from their website.