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Regarding fruity flavoured black teas, I got a weakness for lychee as a flavour. Seriously, just try it, it´s flowery, fruity, exhuberant and somehow it just goes so well with tea – beats earl grey all the time (lady grey is a different matter). Even the most humble lychee blends can make a cup which makes me go hmmm.

This is maybe the nicest lychee flavoured black tea I ever had. It´s bagged yes, not sure they even make loose tea, but the quality of the tea and flavour is awesome, and it´s tea bags in those hermetically sealed little tin foil packets – those envelopes do no miracle for bad tea, but when tea is good, it can be so much better than more oxidized loose tea leaves.

Just a note, blender description says lychee blossom flavour. I never ever saw a lychee blossom, and have no idea what it smells/tastes like. For other fruits the blossom and fruit usually taste and smell VERY different (orange blossom and fruit, for example), so I wonder if they made the blossom/fruit confusion, this to me tastes precisely like juicy sweet ripe lychees – the fruit.

Hmm, tasty. Infusing twice working nicely as well.

A warning, my appreciation of this might be biased, Mozambique tea was the standard of “just right” black tea for portuguese ladies of my grandmother´s generation, and this tastes just like “just right” grandmother´s tea to me. Cultural expectations of taste are pretty strong.

This is small leaf black tea, packaged in vintage style (well, not vintage style, real vintage vintage) instructions on how to brew a proper pot of tea . I followed those scrupulously. It would feel like ignoring advice from my grandmother, otherwise! It brews red and it reminds me a bit of Ceylon tea, just sweeter, gentler and without any metallic hints (Ceylon tea often seems to have this hint of copper or iron. Not a criticism, I like it like that). It´s not as strong as Assam, and it is quite different from Chinese tea. The taste reminds me a bit of raisins.

It´s also remarkably, the sweetest black tea I ever tasted. It´s sweet on its own, more than any other tea I ever had (tea tea, black or green or oolong or white, if you know what I mean). It also has very little bitterness, I think it does not have much tannin for the body it has.

I usually find it hard to give numerical ratings to tea usually, but in this case it is extra difficult to do so. But it is a lovely nice tea.

This is my foremost example of tea with hibiscus does not NEED to actually stink of it. Hibiscus can be done subtly. Seriously. Though this besides being my foremost example of that, it is also my only example but that is not the point of this review.

If I remember correctly, this tea has rooibos, hibiscus, rosehips, some cinnamon, I think some almond and some other things. All those tastes merge together without clashing and making something new (where even paranoid hibiscus haters can ignore it!). It is a lovely blend, keyword being blend, making something new and just right and totally different out of individual things.

My original tasting note said this was a definite rebuy. It is, though maybe it is not a definite immediate rebuy, this is very good, but a couple or more of other Yumchaa rooibos blends are even better (IMO. YMMV and all that,)

Damn it, yumchaa, there you go and make another blend which is going to became a staple and I will need to keep in stock when finished, no matter what. Please please please do not discontinue this, it just might have medicinal magical sinus clearing properties (I can not prove it, to New England Journal of Medicine standards, but it does feel that way!).

And well, this is it, the spicy rooibos mix I had been looking for all along. It´s got a definite hint of chilli-hotness (there is no proper word in english for it, piquancy maybe? this just might score, even if quite low, on the scoville scale). There is some cinnamon, and there is something from the red peppercorns, definetely there. And some nice rooibos underneath, though if you do not like rooibos I am pretty sure it is subtle enough to be ignored if you want to ignore it. And there is more stuff there, all very nicely balanced, and making something just right. Another huge favorite.

Ah, just a note, this is surely a winter drink kind of stuff.

I have been looking for a good spicy-chai rooibos for a while. This is perhaps my 4th attempt at finding a good one, and maybe just maybe, this is the one. The ones I had previously were all wrong, but this is interesting, none of the flavours really overpowers the other and there is a fiery hotness (piquancy?) of chilli there which works, and better than i expected to. I really loved my first cup of this.

Just not my cup of team (literally).

Ah, a cup of smoke – but it´s sort of an open air very faint autumn field smoke. I do love this.

The discontinuation of this was a false alarm! Yay – bought my second tin.

I like it well enough – rooibos with citrus. As usual with yumchaa everything is good quality and the flavour natural and not overwhelming. But sadly this exact mix is not a favourite of mine – I keep comparing it with Nil Rouge (which I like even more) and a long lost rooibos caipirinha mix i once bought and could never buy again (which probably could not possibly be as good as my memories of it are).