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Happy President’s Day, American Steepsters! I hope you’re enjoying your day off from work!

Anyway, I booted up Mass Effect this morning and spent about an hour trying to come up with a halfway decent character build, that had some of my features. This turned out to be nearly impossible. Well, at least she’s not super-ugly: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v601/SinderellaxD/IMG_0855.jpg Poor, poor Shepard.

Anyway, after taking forever creating my little space marine-ette, I decided to brew some tea. And why not chocolate mint? I’ve been in the mood for chocolate since yesterday, when I received a big box of Godiva dark chocolate. Mmm. Dark chocolate > milk chocolate in every situation.

Harney, hats off for delicious-smelling tea, because this smells amazing. Like rich, quality chocolate mixed with fresh mint. Something Godiva or Lindt or Ghiradelli would put out. Mmm. I could inhale the perfume coming from my little sample bag all day.

But let’s get on with the review, before I start going off on tangents about the joys of mint chocolate chip ice cream and candies. The leaves here are fairly small, and they blend nicely with the peppermint leaves. I steeped this one up, and the infusion smelled… interesting.

Okay. It smells kind of like black tea, but a weak black tea, without a strong chocolate or mint smell. Both the chocolate and the mint are present only when I inhale really hard. Then they come up in the tail end of the inhale.

And the taste… definitely does not live up to the smell. This is sort of hugely disappointing. The front end of the taste is a fairly weak black tea profile. It’s not really robust or spicy. You can tell it’s meant to play a supporting role to the star players here, which is fine, except the star players have vacated the premise. The flavor that I’m mainly getting is mint in the aftertaste. It’s nice and cool and lingering, but the chocolate? Nowhere to be found.

I mean, there’s a sweetness that’s somewhat chocolate-like in the end note of the flavor, but it’s nothing compared to that magical chocolate/hazelnut combo in Florence.

Only after the cup cooled down significantly to the luke-warm range did chocolate appear. It was a nice chocolate taste, and it mingled rather well with the peppermint, but the black tea was sort of drowning it out. The entire thing overall was just very weak. Weak-tasting.

I’m probably more disappointed than anything because the smell vs. taste here is so different. Ah well! Definitely drinkable, but I can’t see myself ordering any more of this after my sample has run out!