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I’ll admit, I chomped down a bag of Oreo Thinsations while this tea was steeping, so my palate may be compromised (with crunchy chocolatey goodness…)
You can really smell that maté strawiness coming through, as well as the coffee. It’s like you can’t really expect what it’ll taste like by the smell. Will it taste like coffee? Like maté? (I am not a maté drinker, by the way. I do not care for the taste. This tea came in the Power teas three-pack at David’s Tea, which was the first thing I bought from them.) It does smell sweet, but — having tried this tea before — I’ve dumped in a healthy amount of whole milk and granulated sugar, so that may be helping.
There were no actual beans or chunks of cocoa in my teaball while I was steeping.
It is a very pale tea, with almost more of a puce tinge than the traditional brown I think of when I think tea. Lovely, lovely oily drops flowing on the top and sitting on the rim of my mug where the tea sloshed a little bit while I was carrying it down to the basement.
Mouthfeel is awful at first. Thin and almost tinny. But then it billows up and hurtles itself down your throat as a very robust entity. A strange transition. A characteristic of the maté? Maybe.
The taste is very, very full. I can taste the chocolate (white and cocoa), the faint kiss of coffee, and the sweetgrass maté.
When I was in my early teens, I went and spent a week with my friends (one of whom is a fairly accomplished local performing artist, one of whom works for the socialist government, and one of whom I have lost touch with entirely), and we stayed near a house in a camping trailer. I had never been in a camping trailer, and slept poorly. We all did.
But it was a full moon, and we were all feeling rather spiritual, so we left the camping trailer, gathered sweetgrass, and made it into dolls sitting around a burnt-out campfire under the mostly full moon.
I kind of get that feeling from this tea.