Review and Giveaway – Adagio Teas

Ad|Gifted. This review is very long because I received quite a lot of lovely things. The giveaway is finished now, but if you would like a £5 voucher towards your first purchase of Adagio Teas please send an email to debbie@mumstheboss.co.uk

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by the very lovely people at Adagio Teas, and asked if I would like to review a few samples of their products. Naturally, I said yes – we are very fond of tea in this house. My husband is more of a ‘builders’ brew’ man, but my daughter and I love trying out new blends and fancy tea accessories.

So I said that we would love to receive a surprise parcel, then I sat back and waited. The website says that orders before 6 pm are despatched the same working day, so I didn’t have to wait long at all to receive my samples.

And I got a very big surprise indeed…

You can buy individual tea blends on the Adagio Teas site, but what I really love about this site are the Tea Sampler packs.

In each pack, you get three or four different teas based around a theme, as set out on the box. Altogether you get between 20-40 cups of tea in each box. These are just fabulous as small gifts for tea lovers – maybe even a teacher gift.

As you can see from the photo below, we received quite a few tea samples in our pack – over 40 different types of tea to try – I’m in heaven!

When I first opened the box, I thought we should try to sample them all before writing the review, but I’m afraid the task has defeated us. Plus you would probably get bored and lose the will to live before you got to the end of my tale…

So I’m going to review a couple of the boxes below, and then do a few more reviews over the next few weeks, which I will link in at the bottom when I have completed them.

The IngenuiTEA teapot

Not only did I receive some lovely tea samples in my box of delights, but also this nifty little teapot. The IngenuiTEA range of tea makers comes in 3 sizes: Normal, for one cup at a time, XL for a large mug or a glass of iced tea, and mine, the IngenuiTEA2 which makes just about 2 normal sized mugs of tea.

What makes it so ingenious is the way this teamaker pours, which means that even though the tea is loose inside it, and steeps beautifully, you don’t need to use a strainer.

So, basically, you add your tea loose inside the teapot – this is the White Strawberry summer blend, which looks so pretty and tastes delicious too!

Then you add the water and let the tea steep following the directions on the packet for the ideal water temperature and steeping time. If you are not using clear mugs then you will need to learn how much water you need in the teapot to fill your particular mug.

And then you pour….

The teapot has a very clever sprung bottom, so when you place the tea maker onto your mug, the liquid flows out of the bottom of it, and when you lift it, it stops.

As I hinted above, the one drawback of this is that if you have a normal china mug, it is difficult to see exactly when to stop pouring and you may cause a spillage. But once you have used the InfiniTEA a few times with your chosen mug, you will soon know the correct amount of water to use.

Alternatively, you can buy these gorgeous tea glasses from Adagio too. They certainly make each cup of tea special for me. I used to be a big mug type of girl, but after I’ve had the first great big (medicinal) cuppa of the morning, I prefer these – they make each cup of tea more like a ceremony.

and so, to the Teas Themselves

Here are the boxes and samples that we have managed to test already. I’ll be adding to these as I go along…

1: Earl Grey Sample Box

The first box we dived into was the Earl Grey box, because my daughter and I are both partial to a bit of citrus, particularly bergamot. So the Earl Grey box has four different takes on this classic tea blend:

• Earl Grey Bravo – the Classic Black tea with bergamot, spiced up a bit with the addition of orange peel. This is billed as high-caffeine and recommended as an afternoon tea, although I would probably drink it as a pick me up in the morning. I think the orange is a lovely addition to this classic.
  
• Earl Grey Moonlight – Earl Grey tea fragranced with vanilla and cream. The site says it’s a great tea to be served with cupcakes. I wasn’t so sure about this flavour combination and prefer the others, but it certainly was what it said on the tin, so if citrus and vanilla is your thing then go for it!
  
• Earl Grey Green Tea – this would help with my conundrum as to whether to have Earl Grey or Green tea first thing in the morning – it brings my two best tea types together in one bundle. I think the fresh perky crispness of green tea goes fabulously with the bergamot and this could become a morning favourite of mine.
  
• Rooibos Earl Grey – This is what to drink if you absolutely love the taste of Earl Grey, but for one reason or another you are trying to reduce your caffeine intake. Certainly, while we were on this tea tasting odyssey, the need to balance caffeinated and non-caffeinated tea was definitely an issue.
  
  I’ve been drinking a lot of rooibos after mid-afternoon lately, as I find a get a better night’s sleep if I cut my caffeine later in the day. I prefer a naturally caffeine-free brew to drinking a tea of coffee that has been artificially de-caffeinated.

So here they are – all the Earl Grey samples – dear reader, we valiantly tried them all! As you open each sachet, the scent is just amazing, and as you can see each of the teas looks really special too. I love the addition of the little blue cornflowers and the citrus rinds.

I also love the way that you get very clear instructions on the back of each sachet as to how to prepare each tea for the best possible experience. OK, once I had tried each tea, prepared exactly according to instructions, I have also bent the rules a bit too, but then I’m like that.

2: Berry Iced Teas

Of course, Mother Nature then sent us a curve ball. We were trying to sample as many different teas as possible each day in June, then along came a great big heatwave, which frankly rendered most forms of hot tea completely unappetising…

Thankfully the lovely Adagio folks had thought of this, and there were more than a few iced tea samples in the kit too. The ones which we were first drawn to were in the Berry Iced Tea Sample kit.

The iced tea sample kits are presented slightly differently to the hot teas. Instead of loose tea, in each sachet you get two little gauze pouches of tea, which you can mix with cold water and steep overnight in the fridge to produce your perfect iced tea.

You can tell the differences between the herbal teas (no actual tea and no caffeine) which are in yellow sachets and the white tea blends which are in green sachets. You can also see that the pouches inside vary in size depending on the content of the tea blend, so that you get the perfect blend for each jugful.

When you come to make the iced teas, you will realise that Adagio Teas is originally an American company which has recently expanded to the UK and Europe. Each iced tea pouch makes one quart of iced tea, which Google tells me is 1.137 litres, a bit awkward for jug sizes here.

So you can either improvise and guesstimate, or you can buy a quart-sized glass tea pitcher from Adagio too, which matches the tea glasses beautifully.

Again sampling each of these iced teas over several days, the first thing that really strikes you is the huge powerful aromatic punch when you first open the packet. I’m used to buying my fruity teas as teabags from my local supermarket, but having smelt these blends I’m not sure I will be able to go back.

My favourite of the three flavours in this sample pack is definitely the Berry Blast, a mixture of forest berries, rose hips and hibiscus. Of course, when you sample a fruity tea, it’s never quite as sweet tasting as it smells, but if you’re craving sweet stuff but trying to cut down, then this can go a long way to satisfying that craving.

And as for replacing the need for a warm cuppa when the temperature is soaring – yes this definitely hits the spot!

The jug pictured here is quite a lot bigger than a quart, but after steeping overnight, it still tasted delicious.

3: Lavender Lemon

Even though I received a huge box of samples from Adagio, I have already ordered more from them, as I wanted to gift some of the lovely sample boxes to my sister for her birthday (and I didn’t want to part with any of mine!).

There are two things I really like about this company (apart from the fabulous tea) which will definitely keep me coming back for more! The first of these is the loyalty points scheme, so that each time you order you can earn points and exchange them for freebies. And the second thing is they like to chuck in free samples of things you might like into your order box.

If you order from them right now, as I did, one of the samples you might find tucked in your box is the Lavender Lemon herbal blend, which is one of their summer specials.

I’ve been drinking this tea at bedtime, with the addition of a little tiny spoonful of honey and it is just extraordinary.

I wasn’t sure about the idea of drinking a lavender flavoured tea, but I needn’t have worried. The lavender aroma is very strong as you open the packet, but in the finished drink, it takes second place to a beautiful crisp and zingy lemon flavour.

These two scents and flavours evoke very powerful emotions for me. I’m already conditioned to associate lavender with bedtime as I often diffuse lavender essential oil in my bedroom when I go up at night, or spritz lavender, chamomile and vetiver sleep spray on my pillow.

And lemon for me is the essential scent of summer – the scent of pure happiness. I love lemon flavour on everything – of course, it’s normally found on things that are not so good for you, so to find a really potent lemon flavour in a tea, makes that a cup of instant contentment for me. Lemon I can consume, with no guilt!

When I drink this tea at night I feel the cares of the day melt away and I settle into a warm and fuzzy happy vibe – definitely ready for bed.

I think out of all the teas I have sampled so far, this one is my absolute favourite, and I will definitely be restocking when my sample runs out.

And so, it’s giveaway time!

Well done for making it to the bottom of my ecstatic ramblings (and if you skipped my review to get straight to the giveaway I don’t blame you)

So what do I have for you? I have a free IngenuiTEA2 teapot for one lucky reader along with five sample boxes from Adagio Teas.

The contest is going live on this page on 11th July, and will run for two weeks, for UK entrants only.

To enter, I will be asking for a comment below, with extra entries for sharing this post across social media. Please note the comment will only count as an entry if you register it in the Rafflecopter box as well.

Whichever flavour you choose in the comment below, I will try to get it added to your prize if you win.

a Rafflecopter giveaway