In recent months, with the cold weather, I've been trying out the Twinings range of green teas. Ordinarily I'm not much of a tea or coffee drinker and usually opt for a hot chocolate when I want something warm. This however is not the healthiest of options and for this reason I decided to try out the range of herbal fruit and green teas that Twinings offer. One of my most recent trials was 'Green tea with pineapple and grapefruit'.

The health benefits of drinking green tea have been widely publicised in recent years. It is rich in antioxidants and is supposed to be helpful for lowering cholesterol, has the potential to protect from heart disease and cancer, aid weight loss and slows down the aging process. Quite impressive for a simple cuppa! I quite like green tea on its own, but can find it a bit bitter, so recently I have been trying out flavoured green teas.

The tea comes packaged in a green box with a picture of half a grapefruit and half a pineapple on the front. I've noticed that Twinings have recently redesigned the packaging on a lot of their teas and the box in the shops now looks slightly different. On opening the box I was pleased to note that the tea bags were individually wrapped as I do like to take some tea bags to work with me, and it is not always practical to do so when they come unwrapped. A box containing 20 tea bags currently retails at £1.26 in Tesco's but can often be found on offer, as it currently is, with three boxes within the Twinings range for £3.

Making a cuppa is really easy. Just pop in a mug, pour on boiling water and leave to brew. It is recommended that you don't let this brew longer than two minutes - I have done this in the past when I got distracted and the tea does tend to get quite bitter which is not so pleasant. Once brewed the resulting tea is a golden brown colour. As it brewed I was immediately hit by how fruity it smelled. It smelled really zesty, and summery but also quite sour and I for this reason I was a bit apprehensive about trying it!

Taking my first sip my fears were confirmed. The flavour of the tea is dominated by grapefruit and although it tastes quite zesty and fruity it also is quite sour. It's not a taste that I particularly liked as I found it a little too sharp and bitter. Rather than finding this tea refreshing I found that it left my mouth feeling quite dry and by the end of the cup I was left feeling quite thirsty.

Despite containing pineapple as well, this is something that I could not detect as the grapefruit was quite overpowering. It's a shame really as I really do like pineapples and this is what attracted me to the tea in the first place. Still, I'm not surprised at this as grapefruit does have such a strong flavour and I would expect it to win when pitted against a pineapple. Given this fact it's strange that Twinings chose to blend these two fruits together. I don't tend to add sugar or sweetener to green or herbal teas but in this case felt that I needed to in order to tone down the sourness.

Overall I didn't particularly like this offering from Twinings and doubt that I shall be purchasing this particular variety again.