Twinings – Blackcurrant and Blueberry
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Instagram has a lot to answer for. I haven’t yet reached the stage where my life is a series of stylized and curated Instagrammable moments, but I reckon I might be getting there. Only today, I was enjoying some homegrown blueberries plucked straight from my Surrey garden. Halfway through, I thought to myself, “What are you doing here, Em? Just eating this stuff like some kind of animal? These here blueberries are a perfect tea photo opportunity if ever there was one!”
And that, readers, is why today’s tea review is Twinings Blackcurrant and Blueberry herbal tea. I needed a tea to match my fruit harvest and this one was the best fit.
We all know how this tea review is going to go, and it’s not going to go well. I have made no secret of my disdain for non-tea fruity tisanes, and I’ve had Twinings fruity offerings before. This one contains hibiscus, rosehips, blackberry leaves, liquorice and blackcurrant and blueberry flavourings, all carefully blended together into a cup of purple pointlessness. If you like this sort of thing, you’ll probably like this. If you’re me, you won’t.
Twinings weren’t the first herbal teas to disappoint me. That honour goes to Heath & Heather, whose tea bags used to be sold singly in Holland and Barrett, tempting teenage me to try the whole selection. Every one of them promised so much and delivered so little.
The thing is, I wanted for a very long time to like herbal teas. I always felt like I was the sort of person who should like them, and not just because I’m a tofu and lentil eating hippy. I used to have a huge herb garden, in which plants were grown not just for their culinary uses, but also their supposedly medicinal ones. My thirty-year-old Encyclopaedia of Herbs is one of the most well-thumbed books on my bookshelf.
There was a time when I could have happily reeled off a list of herb-based infusions decoctions and poultices for anything from anaemia to chilblains. I could have told you their elemental and astrological attributes too. Many years ago, I published an article in credulous New Age ‘Prediction‘ magazine on the magical properties of herbs.
It took a long time to acknowledge the creeping realisation that – you know what? – a lot of these fruit and herbal infusions taste a bit shit. But when I finally did, it came as a massive relief. It was like when I got pregnant and realised I had an excuse not to go clubbing anymore. I didn’t know how much I hated nightclubs until I gave myself permission not to do them.
So you see, my indifference to herbal teas is not a knee jerk reaction. It’s a finely tempered apathy wrought over many decades.
That’s the nice thing about getting older. I find it’s much easier these days to recognise the things I actually like, rather than the things I think I should like. Now all I have to do is tackle this compulsion to photograph my afternoon snack and put it on Instagram. Then I really will have grown as a person.
Today’s featured book is Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, chosen for no better reason than the blueness of its cover.
