If I’m not sipping a can of diet coke through a hot pink straw , you can bet that I will have some other sort of beverage nearby, lurking just out of sight. I’m a sucker for brightly coloured drinks, be they iced teas, slush puppies, juices or cocktails…

I guess I have made my point.

Since summer 2012, I have developed a real taste for herbal teas, and today, having just returned from the health food store, I am writing a tea blog of sorts! Writing the words “tea blog” makes me think of Grav3yard Girl, a texan youtuber who is known for her “tea vlogs”, amongst many other hilarious and fabulous things. If you, like me, are interested in disney theme parks, make-up and  things related to folklore and the paranormal*, then you should give her videos a watch.  If anyone else is a fan of Grav3yard Girl, then regard my following direction as an homage to her – please feel free to go and get some tea, whether it be of the English, herbal or iced variety, before I continue with the monologue that I’ve got going on here.

If you are not into your teas, then I recommend a black coffee or a white/mint hot chocolate! You can get so many different varieties of hot chocolate nowadays – I recently bought my gran ‘Turkish Delight’ flavour by Options, a great supermarket brand. There are also fancy tubs of hot chocolate that you can buy from Whittards of Chelsea – think along the lines of banoffee pie and chilli chocolate. Anyway, enough talk of these delicious chocolatey poisons, back to the subject of tea, glorious tea! I always like to have my tea in a fancy mug.

A cupcake mug will do nicely. This is my all-time favourite mug – but when I travel around, it is too precarious to sling it into a suitcase, so it must sadly remain in and the cupboard, and I must rely on my Aristocats Marie mug instead. My preferred brand of tea is PUKKA teas, which come in oh so many flavours and cost around the £2-3 bracket for a box of twenty sachets. Having managed to get through two boxes of their peppermint and liquorice flavour (weird combination, right?) over the past month, I went on a quest today to purchase some more….

On the shelf where they normally have their PUKKA teas (not sure why I am putting it in capitals, but I guess it makes for a good exclamation, PUKKAAAA!) they also had a new brand called TEAPIGS (TEAPIGS!) This is a brand that I have heard tell of, mostly in the emails that I get sent from beauty box subscriptions. I was curious to see if there would be any difference in taste, and if the TEAPIGS would live up to their elaborate packaging. They were more expensive than the others, at £3….something for 15 tea sachets. But I thought it would be interesting to try them out, seeing as I love the PUKKA version so much.

Verdict: The presentation of the sachet, or “tea temple” as they call it, is pretty, you can see the contents clearly and it is shaped like a pyramid. Taste wise, the emphasis is on the peppermint, with quite a strong (and bitter) minty aftertaste. Whilst this feels quite refreshing, I have to say that I prefer the sweet liquorice aftertaste of the PUKKA tea – it’s also quite pleasing to know that 20p of every purchase of the PUKKA flavour goes to WWF. However, I will definitely have to try some of the other TEAPIG flavours, (I noticed there was crème caramel) On the back of the TEAPIG packaging, it also gives directions on how to enjoy the tea as an iced tea. I’m not sure that this would work well for mint, however you CAN make your own ice tea just by using normal tea bags, sugar and a lemon/peaches! In Germany, they sold Arizona iced tea in really ornate bottles – very sugary but a light and refreshing alternative to juice and sodas (and of course, to the healthiest of liquids… water…)

So there you have it. The first Valise de Louise Tea Blog. I often scour the web for reviews before I buy things now (I mostly look for reviews on make up *coughOPInailpolishcough*) so I thought it was maybe time for me to write a review or two of my own.  Do let me know if there are any drinks or brands that you think I should try – I’d be delighted to hear from you.

*When I was younger, my Dad used to organise tours of churches, graveyards and ancient burial grounds on the Island, and I would always end up tagging along and listening to all the tales of our Island’s rich folklore, history, witchcraft and ghostly happenings. This is a topic that has continued to interest me, (alongside many others) throughout my teens and into my adulthood. I love to tell stories, and after having enjoyed worked as a museum tour guide for six years, I think it would be great to be able to organise tours of my own one day!