74 Tasting Notes
Final tally came out at 184oz of tea for 2oz mix. That’s pretty close to a gallon and a half! Enjoyed every bit of it, too. This tea never lost its flavor, and never stopped having swirly chocolate in the bottom of the cup. One of the best teas ever!
Preparation
Skipped a log, so I’m now at 112oz… I really enjoy this tea. It tastes even better when more sweetener is added… Doesn’t taste so good when it gets cold… Probably would if brewed like chai and chilled in a chocolate milk sort of way, but as a plain, water brewed tea, it just isn’t good cold.
Preparation
80oz… The oily layer on top is really bugging me, now. Is it the melted chocolate chips? Is it a by-product of the steeped nuts, coconut, and cocoa pieces? Could it be the salt?
Either way, this really is a tea that you either need to drink down quickly, or drink with a spoon. The melted chocolate mixes well with the water at first, but after sitting, sinks to the bottom of the cup and needs to be stirred back in.
Preparation
It’s probably low quality chocolate chips. I have a blend from another company where they used cheap chocolate that always goes oily on the top.
It could also be the coconut, because most teas with coconut will have a slight oily surface from the oil in the coconut.
I think you’re correct LiberTEAS, as the tea I was referencing also has coconut in it. I bow to your tea knowledge.
Fourth steep, 64oz, considering how this experiment will go as I drink this tea with spaghetti dinner…
The caramel and chocolate flavors are starting to blend better, now… Before, they tasted more separate and distinctive, but now, it tastes like a really good bite of a less sweet Milky Way – very blended flavors, not at all overwhelming. I think the next steep may call for an extra scoop of mix, though, to keep it from getting any weaker.
Preparation
Third steep, puts me at 48oz thus far.
This blend is still sweet, but now the chocolate note takes a bit of a backseat to the caramel flavoring… a surprise, since the caramel disintegrates with each brew and the cocoa and carob don’t. When a bit of salt is added, the chocolate notes change into something almost coffee-like. Each infusion is brewing darker than the last, and each has that odd oily layer on top, like the first cup.
Still enjoy the tea, but as I drink the second round, its worth noting that this tea has added sugar in the flavoring – plain sugar is listed three times in the ingredients list.
As with the last “herbal infusion” teavana tea I tried, I decided to just dump a spoonful of new mixture on top of the previously used mixture and re-steeped. That cut the amount of sweetener down pretty well and let me control it.
So, the flavor of this second steep didn’t differ much from the first. The chocolate flavor was more milky than the first, the caramel more creamy… Still tasted no salt, but enjoyed the flavor much more than the first steep! I’d love to start counting now how many good tasting oz I get out of this baggy, and right now we’re at 32. My goal is a gallon.
Preparation
When I first opened the bag, the dry tea smelled very strongly of freshly cooked, just off the stove caramel, which was a shock – usually, in chocolate containing teas, the hot cocoa smell overpowers everything, and I was hopeful that this would be more of a caramel taste with an undertone of chocolate.
After brewing, the chocolate really came out – the tea and spent leaves both smelled of melted chocolate pieces, with little caramel or salt to be found! Luckily, the chocolate and caramel balance much better in the cup. This is a pretty good dessert tea – probably not worth the original asking price, but at less than $1/oz, with each oz probably giving me over a half gallon of tea, I can’t complain.
I also can’t speak to the salt in this blend. I don’t taste it, but I’m a salt hound and probably wouldn’t taste it unless it was so salty it made normal folks cough.
