Whittard – Cranberry and Raspberry
On their website, Whittard say that they love to drink Cranberry and Raspberry black tea “as a jubilant brew during the height of summer,” but I think this cranberry-based tea is well suited for the betwixtmas season, what with the fruit’s long and noble tradition of gracing Christmas dinner tables.
There’s also a long-standing tradition in the Tea Fancier family of forgetting to get it out of the fridge. You know it’s Christmas when my mum suddenly shouts, “We forgot to put the cranberry sauce out!” halfway through dessert.
Did you all have nice Christmases, by the way? Mine was lovely, a perfect blend of family, merriment and insane quantities of food.
I could use that “perfect blend” bit from the previous paragraph to segue back to talking about Whittard’s Cranberry and Raspberry tea, but nah, I’m not going to do that.
It is a jolly nice tea, though. It’s got real, live cranberry and raspberry pieces in it, as well as natural flavourings. (The fruit bits aren’t actually live. I assume they’re humanely killed beforehand.) Its robust black tea base makes it amenable to a splash of milk and makes for a fragrant tea that’s still a proper cuppa you could dunk a biscuit in.
It would sit happily alongside Earl Grey in some kind of hypothetical tea Venn diagram. The tangy sharpness of cranberries makes them an excellent addition to tea, bringing fruitiness to the table without unnecessary sweetness. Much like the bergamot orange, in fact.
Whittard have done a splendid job here. It’s definitely a tea that doesn’t need to be kept back until summer. I’m planning to enjoy this all year round.
