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I think you would be hard pressed, especially in the tea-drinking community, to find someone who was not at least passably familiar with peppermint. Maybe not a fan, but at least familiar.

I’ve decided that there are certain blends of herbs, teas, other such things that I wanted to try my own hand at making. However, I’m pretty self-aware in what I’m lacking, which is a base understanding of what particular ingredients truly taste like. And if I’m going to do this, I need to do it right, and that starts at the basics: stop and understand, truly understand, what each ingredient tastes like.

And what better to start with than something as ubiquitous as peppermint?

The smell of the dry leaf is truly wondrous and powerful. Though, it is an 8 oz bag, so it’s a LOT of mint (think if you stacked three bricks on top of each other, and that’s the approximate size of this bag of peppermint). The smell is sweet, lush and foresty. It feels cool on your nose at first, but with a sharpness at the end. Invigorating.

While steeping, that aroma begins to fill the room, and I find myself challenging my first preconception: the liquor is not green. It’s actually a reddish-amber color, that deepens to an auburn-brown as it steeps. Darker than I expected, more of an earthiness to the color.

The smell of the brew is significantly less powerful than the smell of the dry leaf. It is still sweet and foresty, but the cooling sharpness has mellowed to a more agreeable level.

The taste is sweet and pleasant, Sharp, fresh, cooling. The taste has similar qualities to pine, but less abrasive, muted, like a pine forest after a rain. Powerful from start to finish, from the moment it crosses your lips, to the lingering chill that it leaves well after you’ve swallowed.

This is so amazingly good. I’ve never had fresh, straight, high quality peppermint tea before… and this really blew me away.

I think I’m going to have fun with this.