Peppermint Patty

It’s time for a confessional. As a testament to how much Rayn and I loved this tea, we have drank a whole ounce of it in a week, and now it is gone.

I’m not sure if this is a sign that I should get more or I should seriously limit myself on this one.

This is the first of my batch of Butiki teas. The beau doesn’t like mint so I was allowed to bring it to work. Yay! This is where I get most of my tea drinking done so it is nice to have new things to enjoy. Looking at the leaf, I have a lot of chocolate chips, lots of peppermint and some fuzzy leaves as well. I am guessing the fuzzy looking ones are marshmallow leaf. Very cool!

Unfortunately the water available to me wasn’t boiling so I am steeping extra long to get maximum flavour. It got 10 or 15 minutes in the end, which is fine by me as I love mint. I have a number of pure mint teas and also a couple chocolate mint teas but I have rather fallen out of love with Read My Lips by Davids (the chocolate is too artificial) so I would love to have a new fave.

First sips are mint but tempered by sweetness, presumably from the marshmallow. Despite the plethora of chocolate chips, I don’t get too much chocolate, it is mostly at the end of the sip. The experience here is much like a mint patty with a bit of residual ‘burn’ from the mint. It is more sweet and ‘rounded’ rather than sharp mint and I am really liking it. I would almost like more mint but I could always add some or try again with boiling water.

So far so good. I don’t feel like I need to have it all the time, but I would definitely rather have this on hand as my chocolate mint than Read My Lips. A win!

EDIT to add: This one needs more leaf and more time than Butiki’s recommendations for my tastes, but is still a solid option. I think that doubling the leaf, leaving the bag in the whole time and potentially adding even more mint could improve it, but that seems counterproductive. Thinking that maybe this isn’t one to re-stock on, since I would have to do some things to it. We’ll see.

I like peppermint…fresh in salads & also in my toothpaste (Nature’s gate Creme de Peppermint), oh, and in my Burt Bees chapstick! It’s my favorite mint, but I’m not so much of a fan of any mint in teas, & when I do have it in teas, I prefer it in iced teas. So I was somewhat skeptical of this tea, which I received as a sample from Stacy in (one of) my recent Butiki order(s).

I really haven’t had much tea today, but I also don’t want anymore caffeine, since it’s getting into the evening now. So here it is.
The flavor is fine, mint & chocolate, with a bit of a creamy texture to it. The quality of the mint is excellent, my sinuses are enjoying it. I didn’t add stevia, but I think if I had the chocolate would be more present. What I don’t like is after the first sip, my throat immediately feels scratchy. I’m not sure why.

I got this with my latest Butiki order. One thing I really like about ordering from there is the super fast shipping and great customer service (oh yeah, and samples!)

Anyway I had been wanting to try this for a while now. Peppermint and I do not always get along, in the past I’ve had issues with heartburn but that hasn’t been bothering me too much lately.

I steeped my tisane for 5 minutes and then tried it – definitely very minty with a chocolate flavor present. I decided to try adding a bit of soymilk to this (yeah I’m weird) and now it reminds me of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Very tasty! This is a lot better than I thought it would be. It’s hard to find a tisane that really blows me out of the water but I could see keeping some of this on hand in the permanent collection. Hopefully the mint agrees with me.

My Butiki order came yesterday and I immediately opened the box and brewed this one up!
I like mint, and I love chocolate, so this one was sure to be a hit….and of course it was. Mint is definitely the strongest flavour for me. The chocolate adds a nice creaminess in the background.
Delicious and a wonderful bedtime treat!

I cannot remember who I got this one from. I know I got it from a swap though. HA HA. Maybe KallieBoo ? Anyways… this one went on my shopping list right away. I love the mixture not only mint and chocolate but green tea too? Mind Blown. I have yet to find a Butiki Tea that doesn’t blow my mind. Yet another great experience from one of Stacy’s blend. Thank you to whoever I received this from. Ha Ha I just wish I had more than one cup worth. This is a major back log too. I had this last week… I haven’t been logging lately because I have been super sick and super busy with work.

1.5 tablespoons for 375 ml

Primarily mint flavour with very mild sweet chocolate edge. The mint flavour isn’t too strong. Smooth mouthfeel.

Second infusion at 7 minutes. I made sure to mix the brewing tisane a bit to ensure that the chocolate chips melted. Chocolate flavour is very authentic- dark chocolate taste with a little bit of sweetness. The flavour reminds me of a thick hot cocoa beverage. The mint flavour is unfortunately not as powerful in the second infusion.

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!

In the spirit of getting back to mindful tea drinking, I bought myself a cute little teapot and matching cups. My other teapot is huge, so I rarely get to use it (as I’m surrounded by coffee drinkers!) But this one is small, so that even when I’m having tea on my own it can feel like a special occasion. Since the set is a peppermint color, I thought it would be appropriate to try it with this tea first!

This is a perfect bedtime tea for warm summer nights. It’s comforting but the mint makes it refreshing as well. The marshmallow root adds a nuance that other mint chocolate teas lack, kind of a fluffy or creamy undertone. When I smelled the empty cup afterwards, it smelled like sweet butter….mmm! It’s not very chocolatey, but it’s a nice treat compared to plain peppermint tea. Overall, it was a solo tea party success!

Backlog:

Yum! Very yum for a tisane! I’m usually less excited about tisanes versus teas with Camellia sinensis, but, I do manage to find quite a few tisanes that I enjoy. This one I definitely enjoyed!

Very minty, with a nice chocolate-y note and the marshmallow gives it a fluffy creaminess that really makes this taste a lot like the candy bar.

Here’s my full-length review: http://sororiteasisters.com/2013/09/16/peppermint-patty-herbal-tisane-butiki-teas/