I gave up coffee when I was pregnant with my second child and never fully went back. Not for any principled reason — I just found that two strong coffees a day left me more wired than energised, and with a toddler and a newborn, wired was the last thing I needed. I switched to tea, which I'd always drunk but never really thought about, and for about eighteen months I worked my way through whatever was in the cupboard without paying much attention.
Then I started noticing the 3pm slump. Not tiredness exactly — more a kind of flatness. The morning had been full and the evening still had everything in it, and the middle of the afternoon felt like a gap I didn't know how to fill. I'd make another cup of builder's tea and it would help for about twenty minutes and then I'd feel worse.
I started looking for something different. Something that felt like a deliberate choice rather than just a habit.
Why Birchall
I'd heard of Birchall but always assumed it was the kind of brand that looked nice and tasted ordinary. I was wrong about that. Birchall is a serious tea company — they source carefully, blend with real ingredients, and their prism tea bags are plant-based and designed to give the leaves room to properly infuse. That last detail matters more than it sounds: a cramped tea bag produces a flat, one-dimensional cup. A prism bag lets the tea move and open, which is why the flavour is fuller.
The Birchall Green Tea & Peach specifically appealed because of the lower caffeine content. Green tea has roughly a third of the caffeine of black tea, which meant I could have a cup at 3pm without it affecting my sleep. The blend uses real fruit pieces and marigold flowers — not artificial flavouring — which I could see in the bag when I held it up to the light. That kind of transparency in ingredients matters to me.
At £28.43 for 80 bags it's more than supermarket tea. It's also less than a daily coffee shop visit, and the 80 bags last me the better part of three months at one cup a day. The maths works out.
The First Cup
I steeped it for two and a half minutes, as recommended, without milk. The colour that came out was a warm amber-gold — nothing like the pale, slightly bitter green tea I'd had before. The smell was immediately the peach, soft and natural rather than synthetic. The taste was gentle: the green tea base giving it a clean, slightly grassy quality, the peach rounding it out into something genuinely fruity without being sweet.
I drank it sitting down. That sounds unremarkable, but with two small children, sitting down in the afternoon with a hot drink that I actually wanted to drink rather than just needed to drink was not nothing. It felt like a pause. A deliberate one.
Three Months On
I'm now on my third box. The 3pm cup has become a fixture — something I look forward to rather than something I reach for out of habit. The flatness I used to feel in the middle of the afternoon hasn't gone away entirely, but having something to mark the transition — a ritual, even a small one — makes it easier to move through.
The antioxidant quality of green tea is well documented, and while I'm not going to make dramatic claims about how it's changed my health, I do feel better in the afternoons than I did before. Less flat, less likely to reach for something sugary. Whether that's the tea or the act of stopping for ten minutes, I'm not sure it matters.
The prism bags have been consistently good across all three boxes. No variation in quality, no bags that taste thin or over-steeped. The plant-based material means I can compost them, which fits with how I try to run the kitchen generally.
Brewing Notes
Two to three minutes is the right window — I've found two and a half is my sweet spot. Water just off the boil rather than fully boiling, which is standard for green tea and makes a noticeable difference to the bitterness. No milk. A little honey if you want it slightly sweeter, though I've stopped doing that and prefer it plain.
It also works cold. I've made a jug of it in the summer — four bags steeped for three minutes, then chilled — and it's excellent over ice. The peach comes through more strongly cold, which makes it feel almost like a proper fruit drink.
Who This Is For
Anyone who wants a lower-caffeine alternative to black tea or coffee that actually tastes of something. Anyone who finds standard green tea too bitter or too plain. Anyone who wants a small, deliberate ritual in their day that doesn't cost much and delivers reliably. And anyone who, like me, just needs a reason to sit down for ten minutes in the afternoon.
You can find Birchall Green Tea & Peach here. If you're exploring more, these collections are worth a browse:
Eighty bags. One a day. Three months of better afternoons. That's the whole story.
— Saoirse Brennan, Dublin
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