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I love mint chocolate but I haven’t found the perfect mint chocolate tea yet. Lately I’ve been adding mint teas to H&S Florence and enjoying the mix, but I would like to find one that doesn’t require the diy method. This one smelled promising in the bag – I can smell lots of mint and lots of chocolate. After brewing, the scent in the cup was not as appetizing, it smells more like dry, stale chocolate. No mint at all. Taking my first sip I was surprised to find it tasted minty, and not very chocolatey at all. What a paradox. If I closed my nose, this could easily be an oversteeped herbal peppermint tea. Minty, slightly bitter, with the peppermint lingering on my tongue after. There is a sort of deep undertone to it, but nothing that says chocolate.

I added a bit of brown sugar because the reviews mentioned a little sweetener helps bring out the chocolate flavor, and it totally changed the tea. Now the thick, heavy, sort of malty undertones are prominent, and I don’t taste the mint at all. I still get a bit of a tingle on my tongue after each sip, but it doesn’t taste minty. Or chocolatey.

I think I’m going to play around a little with steeping times and see if that helps. This tea has so much potential!

I like this tea. A lot. Possibly a lot more than I should. Sometimes I feel myself becoming a bit of a tea snob, turning my nose up at bagged tea and stores like Teavana. But every now and then a teabag is just so delicious I can’t possibly give them up altogether. This is one of those times.

This tea is so deliciously minty, slightly sweet, tastes good hot or cold, and can be re-steeped so many times I lose count. It’s great.

This tea smells amazing in the cup. Refreshing mint with green tea. The two come together well, and make a pretty good cup of tea. It tastes a little more basic than I would have expected. I can see a bit of lemon peel mixed in with the tea but it doesn’t come out til the end, and even then it’s just a hint. The green tea tastes delicious, high quality with a lightly grassy taste. The more I drink this one the more I like it – the mint, lemon, and green tea blend together seamlessly and make a cup of tea that’s even better as it cools. I’m tempted to try this one iced as well.

Thanks go to Nina’s Paris Teas for sending me a sample of this delicious tea!

This is the least pu’er-tasting pu’er blend that I’ve tried (granted I haven’t had very many). I suppose I should start at the beginning! Trying to get all of the elements of this tea into my infuser was a bit of a challenge. The dried chrysanthemum kept tumbling in, followed by some stick like things and juniper berries, leaving behind the poor crumbly pu’er. Finally I just poured the contents of the sample packet into a bowl and picked each individual ingredient with a spoon. Not the easiest tea to brew, but I didn’t really mind. There is kind of an earthy scent to the dry tea, that blooms more as it brews. The chrysanthemum floral and juniper berries really are the star here, both in the scent of the brewed tea and in the taste. I can smell a hint of the earthy pu’er from the cup, and I definitely taste the undertones, but it’s not overpowering at all. In fact, I think the tea is quite balanced between all the elements. Second steeping was just as good as the first, and as I continued to re-steep it the chrysanthemum flavor was the first to dissipate but everything else remained for several steepings.

I only got a sample of this one, and I wish I had more! I tried it twice and it tasted completely different both times. I’m not sure if that’s because I didn’t get a good distribution of the blend in each cup, or my mind is playing tricks on me.

The first time I made a big pot of this tea and it smelled amazing. Ginger and sage and a hint of flowers and citrus. The tea had a strong ginger kick and a background of sage. I can see how it’s used for when people have a cold, but it doesn’t taste medicinal at all, just soothing. The second time I tried it (new tea, not re-steeped) I couldn’t taste ginger at all. It smelled and tasted of paan, a betel leaf, slightly sweet and woodsy. Might have been a little bit of sage in the background. I liked both versions, but definitely prefer the first.

I only have a small sample of this one so it’s hard to smell the tea leaves. They smell faintly of buttercream frosting, and the tiny sprinkles and marshmallows are so cute! The tea itself smells like marshmallows, with a faint hint of burnt sugar. It tastes pretty much the same, and though I like marshmallows, I didn’t like my first sip of this tea. It was cloyingly sweet, and yet it didn’t really taste like sugar. After letting it cool for a few minutes the flavor seems to change, bringing in the caramel and burnt sugar to give it more depth. I definitely enjoyed that quite a bit more than the first sip, but probably not enough to buy more.

Thanks to Jackie T for this sample!

Not sure if I didn’t steep this one long enough (I hate teas without steeping instructions!) but I think I’ll call a re-try. Otherwise this was very disappointing. Slight hint of mint at the end and really that was about it.

Wow! Straight out of the bag this smells like fizzy lime soda. Not the Sprite sort of generic we’re-calling-it-lemon-lime-so-pretend-that’s-what-it-tastes-like, an actual lime scent. A flashback to lime-flavored Eno if there ever was such a thing. I brewed it up and it smells exactly the same. Flavor-wise this is heavy on the lime and it’s obviously not bubbly like soda nor does it have the sweetness of flat soda. I taste pineapple in the tea, which I didn’t smell at all before, and something that I think is the marshmallow. I don’t taste lime very much either, which is slightly disappointing. The green tea exists, I see it in my steeper, but I don’t taste it at all – this tea is quite baseless, and I wouldn’t have batted an eye if told it was a fruit tea or a white. Ah well. 10 points for smell, maybe 6 points for actual flavor. Looking forward to trying this iced.

I went into this expecting an Earl Grey sort of flavor profile, even with the Tieguanyin base, but it doesn’t taste much like Earl Grey at all. You can smell the hint of citrus in the loose leaves of the tea, but it is completely overpowered by everything else after you brew it. The scent of this tea in my cup is very floral, it doesn’t seem like just jasmine but perhaps the frankincense is altering my impression. The taste is a floral oolong, with a heavier almost musty background that I’m guessing is the frankincense. I’m not getting any goji berry or the citrus/bergamot that I was expecting, though in general the tea is a very nice blend. Everything feels balanced (maybe a bit floral heavy) and it tastes like quality tea, just not what I was expecting. The flavors are interesting but probably not something I will reach for often – luckily I just got a sample and don’t have much left anyway!