JavaVana Mate

Many thanks to Will Work For Tea for this sample! Super pumped to try my first Teavana tea!

More mate! Every morning for the last while I’ve been loading up on mate tea. So far I haven’t been hanging off the ceiling or running laps with my rabbit. However, it does keep me awake – this morning I’m looking forward to this cup as I had a crappy sleep. I have a broken finger from brazilian jiu-jitsu that got aggravated yesterday.

DRY: Coffee.. yep, coffee. Like already brewed wonderful coffee, not that pungent bean coffee. Hints of chocolate, oh yeah!

STEEPED: Mocha smell. Brews up to a dark brown.

TASTE: I can taste the black tea and a slight bitterness (very slight), then a light coffee blend with a hint of chocolate filling my mouth. Theres some smoothness at the end, maybe the vanilla? The mate is there, but more in the background. Very mocha-like, without ultra strong/bitter coffee punch, but still close to coffee.

WHO’D GUZZLE THIS TEA LIKE ITS GOING OUT OF STYLE: coffee drinkers (thats right, kick that coffee habit) and mocha lovers. Black tea drinkers wanting to ease into mate.

COMMENTS:
I’m thinking OMG ICED TEA MOCHAS! This tea would be killer for that! A bit of rock sugar in the steeping, some milk/milk alternative and ice, all I need is a cute glass to put it in! No wait, kick it up with some ya know, whipped cream, chocolate drizzle. Blah, not healthy anymore!

So, I recently had a similar mate, Fusion Teas “Good Morning Mate” which I judged to be pretty decent coffee-like tea without tasting bitter liquid death. Good Morning Mate is more on the robusty woody roasted-tasting spiced side. JavaVana Mate is very different on the more chocolate side with extra dimension with the black tea.

JavaVana Mate is pretty good and I think I’ll buy some to gift for my Dad and father-in-law after skimming some off for myself.

This has to be the closest thing to coffee that is mainly tea, as I can’t remember great coffee from various places that taste as good as this.

Before moving completely to tea, I was a coffee drinker, and not a happy one at that.

I had found most coffee made was sloppy or hastily done, very rare did I come across a very well made cup of coffee.

This tea makes drinking coffee fun, as there is a lot going on here, with the mixture of cocoa and chocolate to coffee-mimicking toasted mate and Assam black teas, with a little vanilla for extra flavoring.

Very chocolatey, but not as rich, thankfully, appropriately strong, nicely creamy and smooth.

It is amazing, as I have had mocha coffees before and never liked them, but this tea has possibly the best level of chocolate to tea.

I am also finding that I am liking this tea more and more with each sip.

Having mixed this with one Black Dragon Pearl (black tea) it makes a delicious coffee and chocolately toned black tea/mate mix. A sweet liquour and interesting coloration with hints of dark red to the natural tones of a black tea. A must have on days I want something incredible with my teas.

I super need this today because I just could NOT sleep last night. Stupid insomnia. I think it was around 5 in the morning when I finally fell asleep, if I ever did, so I tried to stay in bed until 10. Sigh. Now I’m trying to be functional and I think this might be my new friend.
Anyway, most mate tastes sorta roasty like coffee to me. I can see why people like it in lattes. (Mate lattes seem to be the newest trend among folks I know. Maybe I’ll try it sometime.) Anyway, this brings back memories of last summer when I drank a lot of mate to try to stay awake without jangling my nerves to death during a summer language program. This has the same vanilla, cocoa, and coffee undertones to it as the last mate I had, with the overall result being very “mocha”. It’s fine, I like it a fair bit but doubt I’ll buy my own stash (Thanks to Ottawa Tea for sampling this to me!)

Side note: I’m so happy to be back home and near my tea collection!

Thanks to RogersCK for this sample. We had to rise early to leave the ship and it was raining and I only managed 1 cup of coffee this morning. This was the perfect way to reunite with my variable water kettle and tea!

This tastes really good (I added sweetener). There’s a roasted kind of taste and also some vanilla and cocoa. I used 2 heaping teaspoons in my 16oz steeping mug. I can see why this would attract coffee drinkers but it doesn’t taste like straight up coffee. It’s a bit lighter. Yummy and I would purchase some to have around, for sure.

This morning I made Mocha Nut Mate (Adagio) and JavaVana Mate (Teavana) at the same time so I could compare them. They are a lot less similar when having them back-to-back than when drinking one and comparing it to my memory of the other (I kept switching between the two mugs… Yes, I was that intense about it. And I continued switching until I’d finished them both).

JavaVana Mate (16oz of boiling water): 2.75 teaspoons tea + 1 teaspoon rock sugar + a little half-and-half

Mocha Nut Mate is definitely pretty good, but I like JavaVana Mate more. What distinguished between them the most for me is that hazelnut is a strong flavor in Mocha Nut Mate whereas the (dark?) chocolate in JavaVana stands out. The chocolate in the latter gives it a kick that I preferred to the hazelnut creaminess of the former. (Both are good, but JavaVana wins for me.)

This is my staple morning maté. Somehow Teavana makes my favorite maté blends, which is the only thing that keeps me buying from them.

I let this one steep while I do morning stuff; it can handle it. Great nose, smells like cocoa nibs and nutty vanilla. Visible bits of vanilla bean in the tea itself.

Brews up dark, the chocolate isn’t as strong in the cup but the vanilla is. Wish it had a richer mouthfeel. Love this, still looking for a really decadent chocolate maté.

First time with this tea this morning and I’m just not sure what to think. On one hand, it does have a strong coffeeesque flavor, but I’m not sure that that’s what I wanted. I am missing the chocolate and vanilla notes but I wonder if I had the water too hot (boiling instead of 200 degrees which I normally use on Matevana). I think I’ll like it once I make a few tweaks.

I’m betting my coffee-loving husband would love it though.

Yep, this one definitely tastes coffee-ish. It reminds me of a mocha. There are some vanilla flavors in it as well. The assam adds a touch of maltiness (although I wouldn’t mind tasting the assam a bit more). I can’t really taste the mate in this blend, it just comes across as the coffee flavor. Prepared with almond milk and stevia.

I’ve been picking JavaVana over My Morning Mate recently, it tastes richer, fuller to me minus the citrus undertones. I need to get some more