Chocolate Mint

YUMMERS! See previous notes…I will share the rest…

I’ve only tried a few chocolate mint teas, and this has been my favorite so far. I’m afraid to go out and try others when I have this security blanket good tea! It smells like a minty snickers bar when dry. I wish the chocolate was a bit stronger than it is, but otherwise, this is a delicious dessert tea.

I made up some for my mom and I. This is one tea that she always likes. I give her plenty of teas to try, but I think most of them she just goes along with because she’s my mom. But this one she really does enjoy. I think I’ll leave the rest at home when I go back to school for her

A big thanks to Azzrian for this sample!

I kind of have a love/hate relationship with chocolate mint tea. I really, really like chocolate mint, mint is easily the second best thing you can pair chocolate with (Vanilla being the first, and a lot of people don’t quite consider that fair).

Now, take this tea for example. It’s quite tasty, the flavoring is good, the chocolate is well done and has a definitely chocolate liqueur taste to it, with the mint flavoring coming in afterwards to cool everything down. There is a smooth black tea flavor that comes in just slightly at the end, but it isn’t strong enough to really play much into the beverage experience. Definitely a solid tea that I could keep around, if I wasn’t such a snot.

But I am, and here’s why: just chop up some mint leaves and put them in the darn tea already. Flavoring is fine and dandy, and really I don’t pick sides on the whole natural vs artificial flavoring thing, as long as the taste works out. But for me, with mint, it never really seems that the taste does work out.

Small detour: I wanted to talk about the weird mint flavoring here, and why it didn’t taste like, you know, mint-mint to me. But my enter key got stuck, and was inserting a billion new lines into my review. So I did what any sane, rational thinking man would do: grabbed the nearest metal thing and pry it off with brute force. This worked well, and my enter key popped up with a nice, satisfying snap and a solid propulsion arc… directly into my tea cup. Seriously, this is comedy gold.

Anyway… plus, mint is so much prettier, and seems to meld in with the tea flavors a lot more than mint flavoring does. This is quite likely psychosomatic, but it seems that I’m much happier with my mint experience in tea if there’s actually shredded up mint leaves, as opposed to mint flavoring which has been applied.

That’s probably enough out of me tonight folks. Have a good first of July ;)

Yay Steepster is back up!

Tonight we are trying another sample from the generous Azzrian. Thank you!

Chocolate and mint are mixed pretty well here. The mint is a tad bit pushy but not enough to hide the chocolate. The base is smooth and quite mellow. This was a good dessert tea.

The dry tea smells just like a Peppermint Patty. This tea is a tasty confection that leaves my mouth feeling fresh and satisfied. It’s more subtle on the mouth, but as Culinary Teas notes in their description: "It should be noted that natural flavors tend to be somewhat ‘soft ‘ and the flavors slightly muted, but for many this is a refreshing change and one of the desired attributes of our naturally flavored teas. "

Keeping that in mind, I appreciate the tea more. There is no hint of anything synthetic or unnaturally brassy. It’s a very nice marriage which, like the delightful York’s Peppermint Patty, tends to draw out the peppermint with the chocolate as a supporting player. So far the best peppermint/chocolate I have had.

Yummy!

The flavors here are very well-balanced. The chocolate is not as strong as I would normally want, but, here it works well, because it is well matched by the level of peppermint and black tea. It has a very harmonious taste to it that my sweet tooth and the chocoholic in me are both responding to very positively.

Delicious.

This is absolutely delicious. I drank the whole 1oz in a matter of a few weeks. It is refreshing and chocolatey. I love having this with milk and sugar in the morning. Delicious blend.