Fans of unabashedly fruity teas, this one's for you. Get some today. "Sweetheart" is well worth giving love, though in a somewhat unexpected way.

While on their website replenishing stocks of other Murchie's teas, I saw this new loose blend, checked the ingredients (including the pieces of coconut visible in the photo but not mentioned in the description), and decided it's worth a try. The taste is delicious, about as anticipated, except that the green tea is much more apparent than the black tea, both in taste and visually in the strainer. Because of the real berries, it's natively sweet, and adding sugar, honey or sweetener almost turns it into liquid candy. The coconut is readily apparent in the flavor too, which pleases this fan of that seed.

The unexpected part was the aroma: powerful, and rather unlike the taste! Sniffing into the bag, it smells like opening grandma's oven to a freshly baked batch of oatmeal cookies with berries. I could inhale that all day. Still, it's about the most different scent from flavor I've found in a tea yet, and that rare tea smell that is resoundingly stronger than the taste. The taste ain't weak, either. Also, in the aroma, I couldn't detect the roses, though with some aid from power of suggestion, the flavor faintly is there. Though I haven't tried it yet, "Sweetheart" should play nicely with chocolate desserts, as the website suggests.

As long as the Canadian dollar has a favorable exchange rate, and maybe even when it doesn't (given how good this tea is), the "value" rating will be at least 4/5. We'll find out after Valentines Day if it's a seasonal offering or year-round.

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