Tag: Herbal tea

Joy Tea: Pukka teas

Joy Tea is part of a range of Pukka teas and a general wellbeing fad for providing emotional sustenance through herbal teas, usually with a self-care undertone. While taste and smell are always evocative, I’d hesitate to agree that herbal tea could meet my emotional needs in the same way that a stiff black coffee can turf me out of bed in the mornings. As Nina Stibbe says, ‘Coffee is not a drink… it’s not a drink like tea is a drink. Coffee is a drug. It’s just like having a cigarette or pill…’* Look, I enjoy herbal tea, really I do, but to suggest that at least the supermarket-level retail version has any psychoactive properties seems to be stretching it a bit. 

Image: https://www.pukkaherbs.com/uk/en/products/joy-tea

I picked up this particular variety while shopping for the final ingredients for Christmas dinner at a huge Tesco Extra, one of life’s less joyful experiences. My other half was hell bent on finding some ready-made stewed red cabbage, and I wasn’t sure that red cabbage was actually a proper part of Christmas dinner, so I started to flag quite quickly after seeking it out in the vegetable section, the ready meal section and eventually the freezer section. The endless patience required for the red cabbage quest plus the need to choose between a massive number of essentially the same beans meant we were starting to get fractious when we got to the tea aisle, so the choice of wellness option seemed obvious, as did grabbing something fast and fighting our way to the checkout as quickly as we could. 

Once brewed, Joy Tea is a golden caramel colour and smells somewhere between dusty potpourri and the orange creams neither of us like in a box of chocolates. But the flavour is a lot more exciting. Many herbal teas tend to be a bit bland, flavour wise, or they smell of bath oil and taste of nothing. This one tastes like high-end neroli perfume smells – both floral and fruity, both fresh and warm – with a thickness that makes it feel quite substantial. Joy is still a bit of a stretch, but this tea genuinely brings some sunny cheer into a cold afternoon, and it’s warming enough for a blustery day. I just wish it would stop reminding me of shopping for red cabbage.

* In Went to London, Took the Dog

Love (Tea)

Last week I walked out of King’s Cross station with my daughter. As we turned on to Euston Road, I told her about the time I nearly missed the Sleeper I’d booked to visit my grandmother in Aberdeen because I went to King’s Cross instead of Euston. I had to run down the road carrying a huge rucksack to get there in time. I told my daughter how I used to visit my grandmother for her birthday in January every year, and how much I loved taking the train overnight. It made me think of Love Tea, so I bought it again today.

Image: https://www.pukkaherbs.com/uk/en/products/organic-teas.html

I loved the idea of Love Tea as soon as I saw it advertised and went straight out and bought it. In retrospect it seems odd to associate herbal tea with romance – in fact anything non-alcoholic seems a bit of a stretch – but that was what I was expecting when I bought it. I got something else entirely.

I explain what we’re testing to The Wife. She inspects the box. ‘Hang on,’ she says, ‘I’ve got to put my glasses on because the writing’s too small.’ A small pause while these are retrieved. ‘Seems to have all girls all over it, there are only two boys down the bottom. It reminds me of that thing…’ Eh?

‘It was on TV in the seventies and eighties, I can’t remember, maybe a Bond movie? There’s always dancing girls in Bond. It went doo-doo-doo… I can’t remember. Anyway, it looks like that.’ She starts trying to work out which are boys and which are girls from the bottom shape. It’s probably time to brew up.

The box suggests infusing for up to fifteen minutes, but our tea looks pretty substantial after five minutes, so I withdraw the bag. I hand The Wife hers, in a mug with a faded Shuri Castle print.

‘I never think fruit tea has a good colour. This one looks like wee. It does!’ She sips and giggles. ‘It’s ‘cos I always look at wee ‘cos I have to. As an athlete. Maybe it’s the mug…’

‘Taste-wise, I do taste quite a lot of lavender and was that because I read that there was a lot of lavender in it, or because it tastes of lavender? Is that rose in there? Maybe we need to dunk the teabag for a bit longer to get another flavour in there. Hmm…’ She sighs, contemplatively.

She continues: ‘I hope this isn’t like the valerian and it makes you sleep and I don’t wake up in the morning.’ She makes hand gestures conveying uncertainty. ‘A bit odd.’ She puts the cup down, picks up her tape measure and goes back to visualising furniture. ‘Yeah,’ she says from over by the telly. ‘Strange taste I think… Have you tasted it?… Oh, this is annoying me now. What is the name of that thing on TV?’

It smells like health food shops. Not Planet Organic or any other modern place: I mean the ones from the eighties, when eating tofu was a bit niche and only done by people in tie dye everything who wore socks and sandals (shockingly, even the latter is fashionable now) – and my granny. Long before it was fashionable, she was a strong believer in organic, holistic wholemeal everything, but also believed that this should be served with butter, cream and full-fat milk – none of your low-fat margarine nonsense. There was a particular vegan paté she favoured; her home-made muesli; dandelion coffee; and robust, grainy bread – plus apparently healthy yet wildly sugary biscuits. In the mornings she made me buttery egg on sturdy toast and set it down on a perfectly laid table, where it was dwarfed by heavy silver cutlery. In the evening she gave me ‘Night time tea’ from a box with a teddy bear in pyjamas on it. Love Tea tastes like her kitchen smelled. It doesn’t taste like any of the things that it’s made of; it smells of dark and heavy Victorian furniture, a sort of musty dustiness with depth. It’s smooth and strangely soothing.

The Wife is still researching the box. ‘Oh was it Roald Dahl? No…’ She supplies me with wine, for romance, still pondering. ‘Tales of the Unexpected!’ she announces, triumphantly. ‘That’s what it was!’ We finish the tea and I start the wine, watching the intro sequence on YouTube.