Tea Laden

Lovely tea, great for medical purposes, such as stomach pain and chest congestion. Particularly when blended with spearmint.

My only previous experience with mate was via some bottled soft-drink sort of thing, so I simply put it off to that; but now having brewed my own, I can confirm that yerba mate really does taste like watered-down Snapple Iced Tea w/ Lemon. :)

It’s tasty enough, but I am mostly interested in finding out if mate’s unique buzz really is everything it’s cracked up to be.

I may have been unfairly maligning green rooibos; this is plain red rooibos with blended flavor, but it possesses the exact same “synthetic” taste I was complaining of in the Teavana blends. Looking over the ingredient lists, methinks “natural flavors” are to blame; but Tea Laden is at least upfront about theirs.

This is very sweet, almost like a fruit soda. Actually, that’s almost exactly what the synthetic taste common to all these blends is: I don’t know if it’s an actual ingredient, but it tastes like artificial sweetener (Splenda, aspartame, etc.).

Yum! I’m not really getting any honey from this, but the apple flavor is very tasty and natural. It’s odd, though; I guess this tea is not particularly well-blended (or perhaps the flavors are too disparate to really go together), because it’s almost as if I’m drinking two separate things at once. There’s a kind of generic, brisk black tea—maybe an Assam?—and then, pow, apple!

Still delicious. This’d be excellent in fall, might work as a dessert tea now.

The lemon flavor only really comes through in the aftertaste, but the lemongrass itself helps add a lot to the rooibos’s own sweet, light top notes. A cup of this before bed time would be excellent.

Icing really changes the character of this. The ginger is so prominent it actually burns my throat a little bit. I like it, but be wary!

Delicious! Good strong rooibos with ginger that is strong enough to be definite without stinging; the calendula petals provide a really interesting, dry aftertaste, almost like ginger ale.