I don't like tea, the traditional tea, in fact I absolutely hate tea! However I do really like the fruit flavoured teas. I do normally buy the Starbucks Tazo Passion Fruit Tea when we are on holiday in the US, I normally buy loads of boxes of it, and so stock up for the next few months. I think I made a bit of an error with quantities last time though and so I've ran out, and our next trip is quite a while off yet.

Normally over the summer months I always have a jug of the Starbucks Passion Iced Tea in the fridge, and as I've ran out of the teabags I'm really missing this. So whilst shopping in Sainsburys recently I decided that I'd try some of the Twinings fruit teas, one of the flavours that I bought was the blackcurrant, ginseng and vanilla.

I thought that this was really reasonably priced, it's a box of 20 tea bags for just £1.19. The tea is advertised as having all natural ingredients, and being naturally caffeine free. It also states that is has no added sugar, and that it's free from artificial flavours.

Over the summer months I will normally drink fruit tea as iced tea, and over the winter months I will normally drink it hot. So I initially used the tea bags to make jugs of iced tea, however I wasn't all that impressed with this particular one iced. I also tried the tea hot, and I felt that this particular flavour was much more suited to drinking hot rather than iced.

To say that I primarily bought the tea to make jugs of iced tea, then I would have to say that I was dissapointed in this respect. The iced tea did have a fresh and fruity flavour. You could certainly taste the sweet blackcurrants, however I thought that the taste of vanilla was a bit too overpowering in the iced tea. To me vanilla is more of a warming taste, and I thought that this was just a bit odd when I had the tea iced. I'm not sure that I could taste the ginseng in this, but I'm not really sure what ginseng tastes like anyway! The tea isn't too sweet, which I liked, but obviously you could sweeten it if you prefer.

I much preferred the tea hot, I thought that it still had a lovely fresh and fruity flavour, you could really taste the sweet blackcurrants, and they were perfectly offset by the rich and creamy vanilla taste. The vanilla is quite a strong taste in this tea and so it's perfect in a hot cup of tea as it's a very warming and soothing taste. For a hot cup of the tea I use one tea bag per large mug, probably around 300ml hot water per tea bag, and I let it steep for around 10 minutes.

I did like this particular flavour fruit tea, but only really as a hot cup of tea. I would certainly buy it again over the winter time as it did make a lovely warming and soothing drink.