I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this!
From the dry leaf aroma I was a bit worried as I got plenty of chocolate but also a strong licorice-y aroma too that I worried was going to be obtrusive once steeped. Instead, this was rich and very chocolate forward with just a hint of some of the other ingredients including the barley malt (yum!) and, yes, the licorice root. Not as much as I’d expected to taste the licorice root, though.
Back in, I wanna say, 2013 DT had a tea as part of their Winter/Holiday collection called Choconut Oolong. It was infamously very unpopular (I think mostly because of the licorice root) and I remember that stores were stuck with it for almost half a year afterwards. Like, it was so unloved that I remember sending my roommate at the time to DT to pick me up a 100g tin of it and the tea guide told him he probably shouldn’t buy that much – implying that I wouldn’t enjoy it and I’d be stuck with a bunch of tea I didn’t want. Kudos to that tea guide for doing the honest but un-salesman like thing and warning him. However I was one of those weirdos that did actually enjoy it a lot. All that to say, this sorta reminds me of my memory of Choconut Oolong. Maybe a little less sweet.
The big thing here is that the “shake” in the name feels quite warranted because this is one THICK tea. It’s got sooo much fine cocoa powder in the blend that it was actually sort of hard to strain the mug because of the sort of “tea sludge” that had been built up in my basket infuser. It added a lot of richness to the tea both in taste and texture, but definitely as I was drinking the mug the word ‘slurry’ came to mind more than one time because of how much sediment was pooling at the bottom of the mug that I had to keep stirring back into the cup.
I didn’t really mind it, but I wanted to point it out because it was a lot and I know not everyone loves a cup of tea with such a distinct texture to it.
