Tag: Lifestyle

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

Graveney & Meadow tea – twenty out of ten for tea

Graveney & Meadow hasn’t been open for long this morning, but it already seems to have woken up. It’s dark inside, and it isn’t brightened by the retro décor or the fairy lights that hang from the ceiling. People are wheeling in buggies with toddlers trotting along beside them or wide-eyed babies, goggling at new surroundings, clutched on one hip. Snatches of squeeze box drift out of the corner where the buggies are lined up, drawing commentary. Toddler requests for lunch are declined, but plates stacked high with muffins and hash browns, with fluffy parmesan on top, are making me hungry too.

The bar man explains that he needs to take some food to people, so he’ll bring my tea over. I don’t mind waiting – my chair is really comfortable. Actually, all the chairs here look like they’d be good for extended sitting. It’s a nice change from the move-on-quickly-please hard chairs in so many places. The tea arrives shortly afterwards, neatly laid out on a tray. The cup is nice and thick, the oat milk is slightly frothy, and the teapot is of the metal, Tardis variety1 – so what looks like a one-cup serving should comfortably yield two full cups, hopefully without scalding the hands. 

Some excellent tea

It’s bag tea, without an identifying tag. I’ve left it to brew for a while, so when I pour it out – successfully, it’s not a true Tardis pot – it’s nice and thick. It’s a solid brew, with plenty of body, richly malty and slightly astringent. And it’s perfect. Twenty out of ten. I bet that’s why all the parents are here – it takes a brew of that stature to get the show on the road again after an exhausting morning of fielding toddlers.

I can just about hear gently ambient music above clattering cutlery and bubbling conversation, then the squeeze box kicks in again, this time with singing, plus the bar man banging coffee out of the machine’s filter. A doddering toddler keeps wandering to the main door and trying to push it. It’s too heavy to give access to the street, but nearly all the clientele look up every time there’s an attempt, just to make sure. 

Watching all this, I’ve managed to spill tea down my second favourite scarf. Although it makes me fit in nicely with most of the other people here, I’m going to head home and sort it out. Back for more twenty-out-of-ten tea soon. 

  1. Ben Elton’s The Man From Auntie, at 2:32, though it’s really worth watching the whole thing – it has aged very well. ↩︎