[Review] Firebelly Tea - Sleekly designed functional blends

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When a representative for Firebelly Tea reached out asking if I’d like to try out some of their teaware and blends, I had never heard about the brand before. After a bit of research, I found that it’s connected to Canadian tea giant DAVIDsTEA and touts several founding principles of quality, health, and sustainability.

Firebelly Tea is an online-only tea brand specializing in additive-free loose leaf tea blends. Their clean website design is meant to take the decision paralysis out of choosing teas by organizing teas by health benefit and providing curated suggestions.

Here’s my review of Firebelly Tea’s herbal blends and teaware!

• Downers - 3 Herbal Infusions ($18.95)

• Tea Strainer ($19.95)

• Teacup ($19.95)

• Matcha ($34.95)

About Firebelly Tea

Firebelly Tea is the brainchild of DAVIDsTEA’s founder David Segal and Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. Since the brand’s website doesn’t have much to offer in terms of history or background, I turned to tons of press coverage on sites like Entrepreneur and Shopdigest to dig a bit deeper into the big names behind this trendy, tech entrepreneur-esque tea label.

Firebelly Tea centers around three main values: natural, sustainable, and fast. Their angle is creating only 100% natural, transparent blends without any artificial flavoring or additives. It’s an interesting 180 degree turn away from DAVIDsTEA’s colorful lineup of loose leaf teas famous for flavorings and bold, sweet add-ins like sugar, marshmallows, or Stevia. (Reasons I have never felt inclined to taste the huge Canadian brand.)

The PR has several claims around “reinventing the tea industry, ” which I personally think is like trying reinventing water. What this really means is that Firebelly Tea invested in unique packaging and design, and does a great job with branding, user experience online, and highlighting sustainability initiatives. It’s overall a solid tea brand for loose leaf tea fans looking for clean blends.

What to love about Firebelly Tea:

• Sustainability - As a growing practice I’ve seen across tea brands, Firebelly is plastic-free and claims its pouches are fully compostable and can degrade in home composts within a year.

• Clean, additive-free tea - The ingredients listed for each tea blend are straightforward and clean—no questionable flavorings or additives.

• Shopping guidance - This brand’s best angle is how well done the site’s shopping experience is. You can browse by tea type, health benefit, flavor, and time of day, or just take a quiz and take the guesswork out.

About Firebelly Tea’s tea collection

Firebelly Tea sources ingredients from around the world, but not much else is available about the farms. A reason for this could be that Firebelly doesn’t actually source or manufacture the teas itself, according to a Montreal Gazette story on the brand. Instead, Firebelly designs the teas, but leaves the rest to 3rd party partners, focusing instead on design and branding.

Reviewing Firebelly Tea’s “Downers” herbal teas

For the tea tasting portion of this review, I was given a set of a few different digestive herbal blends consisting of Paradise, Internal Combustion, and After Dinner Mint. I’m not much of an herbal drinker for health or digestive benefits, so this was an interesting bunch to sort and taste my way through from a purely taste perspective.

Closely resembling a relaxing cup of chamomile, Paradise contains lemon verbena, chamomile, sweet blackberry leaves, rosehips & lavender. I found the dominant flavor here to be chamomile, and couldn’t really make out the apple despite the few big chunks in my cup.

Given the soothing lineup of ingredients in this Firebelly Tea, it’s best for unwinding and relaxing after a long day. Personally, chamomile always has a way of knocking me out!

Next up is After Dinner Mint, a calming chocolate mint concoction. This one uses rooibos as its base and infuses chocolate, mint, and valerian root. It reminded me a bit of York’s Peppermint Patties in tea form.

The final herbal blend is Internal Combustion and while the name is a bit questionable and makes me think of another type of digestive cure, the tea itself is definitely a digestive in its belly-focused ingredients. With ginger, fennel, star anise & chili, this tea packs a punch and is meant for those who like bold spice.

I found the anise to be the dominant flavor, with the chili quite subtle so it doesn’t actually taste spicy.

Reviewing Firebelly Tea’s matcha

The odd man out in this introductory collection of Firebelly Tea products was the matcha. This Japanese matcha is ceremonial grade and costs about $35, or $1.20/oz—putting it in the upper end of matcha powder cost.

As I do with all matcha, I prepared it using a bamboo matcha whisk and bowl and was pleasantly surprised to find just how frothy it became. It has a wonderfully creamy taste with almost no bitterness or aftertaste, making this potentially one of my favorite matcha for drinking on its own.

Reviewing Firebelly Tea’s tea strainer and teacup

I also got to try out Firebelly’s teacup and steeper for this review, each coming in at about $20 retail. The body of the teacup resembles a bit of a coffee cup and has a sleekly designed oval handle that’s surprisingly comfortable to hold. While I received a white one, there are a variety of other colors and the cup is stackable to more easily fit several in your kitchen together. Overall, the cup strikes me with a very “Italian coffee shop chic” type of design and gets the job done.

The steeper comes with a metal holder and attached lip that fits perfectly over the teacup’s handle to secure it in place while steeping. The holes are small enough so little pieces of tea don’t slip out and I like that the metal feels sturdy and not at risk of getting dented like several metal steepers do.

What could be better?

In general, I’d recommend Firebelly Tea to those who appreciate a nice, clean cup of loose leaf tea for the health benefits or caffeine. Each tea online expressly states what it’s functionally good for and what time of day it’s best to drink. The tea pouches themselves are packaged in little boxes that include mention of each blend, but other than a sticker with the name, the pouches miss any information about ingredients, steeping instructions or benefits. Customers are left needing to keep around the small box in order to save this information. I’d love to see that carried onto each pouch for convenience and clarity.

Something else to call out is the slightly higher price point for the teas and teaware. The metal steeper alone is $20, which considering you can steep loose leaf tea with just about anything, seems a bit high.

Finally, I’d love to see more background information on the company and founders on the website itself. I went on a bit of an Easter egg hunt for any information on the business’ founding and story when I first heard about it but had to turn to third party sites to any details at all. Learning more about the journey behind the brand could help justify a more premium price tag as well!

Learn more about Firebelly Tea on their website: firebellytea.com

Tea provided by Firebelly Tea for review.

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