It’s unbelievable the lengths I had to go to to even sample this tea. Of course, Stacy very generously included it with my order, along with a few other samples. The difficulty, of course, is in being able to tell the various samples apart. When I order samples or larger amounts of tea online, I always label the bags as soon as I get them, because I know I’ll be using them several times. But since my labels are sort of difficult to acquire, I don’t tend to use them on one-use samples. So then of course you get last night, when I wanted a decaf pre-bed time delicious option. I had it narrowed down to two: I knew that the two things I had were Moroccan mint and peppermint patty, but I could keep convincing myself that I wasn’t sure which was which. Plus, the samples were in the same box as all my other Butiki teas, so they didn’t smell entirely of whatever they were—they sort of “picked up” on the smells of the other tea. Fair enough, but which oh which was peppermint patty?
So then I decided I’d facetime my friend on the IPhone. Apple is committed to making all of their products accessible to blind people, and this is done without the need to install additional software—go, universal design! Anyway, so we try and facetime, but of course the phone says it’s “connecting” even though it very clearly isn’t. We try this several times, then I give up. So I head upstairs to see if my neighbor (who I don’t know well at all) is at home, and she obviously wasn’t there, so back downstairs I came. I was pretty much resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t get this tea, but then I had the brilliant idea of disabling wifi on my phone and facetiming over the LTE network. It turns out that that solved my problem, as our wireless had been acting up. Uggh Rogers.
Anyway, the tea. It smells as you might expect it to (you know, once you know what it is). Minty chocolate, reminiscent of winter somehow. I brewed it for seven minutes because we all know how I am, and added in some rock sugar. The people who described this as a legitimate peppermint patty are spot on, complete with that crisp, cool finish. I was actually very pleasantly surprised, because most mint teas have a way of making my stomach turn, but this one didn’t (perhaps because it’s peppermint?). Anyway, I actually wanted to add a bit of cream to it but our cream has gone bad (!), so sugar it was. delicious, and I think I might actually add a half ounce to my next order to experiment with it further. The minty part comes at the end of the sip—I’m getting mostly chocolate during the main “body” of the sip. Definitely one to try if you’re on the hunt for a good minty chocolate herbal!
I wonder where I put my bag of this… craving it like crazy now!
Mmmm it might be at my house? Unless you hadn’t finished what you had originally..