Chocolate Mint

Happy President’s Day, American Steepsters! I hope you’re enjoying your day off from work!

Anyway, I booted up Mass Effect this morning and spent about an hour trying to come up with a halfway decent character build, that had some of my features. This turned out to be nearly impossible. Well, at least she’s not super-ugly: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v601/SinderellaxD/IMG_0855.jpg Poor, poor Shepard.

Anyway, after taking forever creating my little space marine-ette, I decided to brew some tea. And why not chocolate mint? I’ve been in the mood for chocolate since yesterday, when I received a big box of Godiva dark chocolate. Mmm. Dark chocolate > milk chocolate in every situation.

Harney, hats off for delicious-smelling tea, because this smells amazing. Like rich, quality chocolate mixed with fresh mint. Something Godiva or Lindt or Ghiradelli would put out. Mmm. I could inhale the perfume coming from my little sample bag all day.

But let’s get on with the review, before I start going off on tangents about the joys of mint chocolate chip ice cream and candies. The leaves here are fairly small, and they blend nicely with the peppermint leaves. I steeped this one up, and the infusion smelled… interesting.

Okay. It smells kind of like black tea, but a weak black tea, without a strong chocolate or mint smell. Both the chocolate and the mint are present only when I inhale really hard. Then they come up in the tail end of the inhale.

And the taste… definitely does not live up to the smell. This is sort of hugely disappointing. The front end of the taste is a fairly weak black tea profile. It’s not really robust or spicy. You can tell it’s meant to play a supporting role to the star players here, which is fine, except the star players have vacated the premise. The flavor that I’m mainly getting is mint in the aftertaste. It’s nice and cool and lingering, but the chocolate? Nowhere to be found.

I mean, there’s a sweetness that’s somewhat chocolate-like in the end note of the flavor, but it’s nothing compared to that magical chocolate/hazelnut combo in Florence.

Only after the cup cooled down significantly to the luke-warm range did chocolate appear. It was a nice chocolate taste, and it mingled rather well with the peppermint, but the black tea was sort of drowning it out. The entire thing overall was just very weak. Weak-tasting.

I’m probably more disappointed than anything because the smell vs. taste here is so different. Ah well! Definitely drinkable, but I can’t see myself ordering any more of this after my sample has run out!

Dry: Finely chopped bits of black tea (looks CTC for the most part) with bits of soft green peppermint mixed in. Smells overwhelmingly of mint straight from the bag, so no skimping on the minty side of this for sure.

Steeped: Clear brown liquor with bits of tea floating on top. This is very finely shredded and the tiny holes on my infuser couldn’t keep them all in. Smells very nice though, like dark chocolate and mint.

Taste: This is a nice afternoon or after dinner tea! It is supposed to be chocolate mint and that is exactly what I get with each sip. It is heavier on the mint than on the cocoa side, but both are present for sure. It is smooth, refreshing, and I like it particularly with a dash of milk. I’d like to keep a tea like this around as a staple, but I will have to compare this to some of the other mint/choco teas out there in the future. Right now though, it is a fine addition to the cupboard.

I purchased a tin of this in sachet-form from The Red Bird Tea Shoppe in Brockport, NY, while on vacay. (Review of the tea house to follow soon.) My grandmother and I enjoyed a cuppa or two.

This is a great marriage of flavors: chocolate and mint. (Aptly named, then.) Not much more to say about it, although I did leave the bag in the cup for the length of the cuppa, and the flavor stayed throughout. I couldn’t reinfuse but that wasn’t expected with a tea sachet, after all.

I love lifting off the tin top and breathing in the rich aroma of the bags, though. Delish!

Hello there Steepster! I missed you too. Crazy things happening with my work schedule with the upside that I’m going to have more time for my tasty teas.

So, I basically squealed when I saw a tin of this tea in Target. I just had to pick it up. I was expecting it to be loose leaf, but it was in sachets. Not that sachets are bad and I really should have been expecting that. After all, it is a Target. Not exactly the best demographic group for loose leaf teas.

This smells heavenly. Very minty with a hint of black tea.

With no additions added, it was mostly mint. A nice pleasant mint. Not a candy flavored whoah this is way too much mint type of deal. But a nice crisp and refreshing sort of mint that is very pleasant to have on a cold winter morning. But there wasn’t a strong taste of chocolate. If I concentrated I could pick out a hint of bittersweet chocolate, but nothing more.

With two teaspoons of sugar there was no change to the chocolate note. You could taste that it was sweetened. So it really doesn’t need sugar. Doesn’t change a thing.

I was reluctant to add milk to it because in my experience, milk often dulls down the flavor of some teas. So I added just a drop. Just enough to turn the tea color from a rich dark brown to a milk chocolate brown. Luckily, that brought out the chocolate note how I wanted it to. It is now a milky chocolate with a light bright peppermint note on the finish all dancing around on a subtle black tea base.

Since I love chocolate, mint, and anything sweet, this has been the most highly anticipated item on my list of teas to try since I first heard about it. Many thanks to ashmanra for sharing her stash with me!

The unbrewed chocolate mint aroma of this tea was so strong that I could smell it through the double wrap of the sample’s packaging. Instead of tea, the aroma was more like an imported fine candy bar.

I brewed the greenish leaves for five minutes at 212 degrees. The result was a golden brown liquid.

I could smell the mint with a hint of chocolate as I began to sip it. The taste was smooth and minty with the chocolate flavor in the background, but still quite recognizable, much like the blend of chocolate mint ice cream. The balance of mint and chocolate was perfect.

I have tried other mint teas before. What sets this one apart from the rest is that this tea has a nice refreshing quality. It reminds me a bit of the mint juleps that were once so popular here in the South.

As I guzzled more and more of this tea, I enjoyed the aftertaste almost as much as the actual experience. The chocolate mint flavor echoed on my palate minutes later with zero bitterness.

This is a phenomenal tea that more than lived up to my expectations. I am currently enjoying it in the morning but I can also see it in my future as a fantastic late afternoon and Summer tea. It will also be wonderful to bring this selection out for those special occasions with friends and family. I am greatly looking forward to sampling other Harney & Sons blends!

This is very close to the Mint Chocolate Rooibos by David’s tea, but the flavor isn’t as intense. It isn’t as minty or as chocolatey (this is shaping up to be a very sophisticated analysis, eh?) But it IS caffeinated, so I guess that will be the determining factor on which one I’ll reach for in the future.

Trying a second cup from my sample. Hmm… I think I like it even better this time! I steeped 30 seconds longer with no ill effects. I let my husband try my cup, and he said “I would drink that. Buy some.” and that’s unusual for him – he usually has no opinions, and just drinks whatever I don’t care for! It isn’t super chocolate-y, but it is creamy and comforting. I had a rather bad day, and it’s making me feel better. Prepared with milk and sugar, and I don’t think it’s nearly as good without. I think I might have to buy a bag!

It is 9 am, and time for tea. And I need a minty punch to kick my butt into gear. Since getting up (late) this morning I have accomplished the sum total of this: 1. Decided I needed some tea (1.5 seconds); 2. Chose Chocolate Mint and heated the water (5 min.); 3. Selected my Teavana Tea Harmony tumbler from the cupboard (5 seconds); 4. Discovered the infuser had not been stored inside it and disassembled entire kitchen looking for it (22 minutes); 5. Found it! (But will not be able to find anything else in here ever again, in the wake of my infuser search…); 6. Made fresh heated water; 7. Logged on to share my agony.

If you have stayed with me this far, you have probably had similar moments. I really need this tea break!

As for the tea itself, the aroma is already bringing me out of my sleep-fog. Mint just shakes me into consciousness, and it is the prominent aroma. It is also the prominent flavor, which is why I add some Half & Half — the milk seems to bring the chocolate into focus and balance everything out. No sweetener for me, though I know many do like this tea sweetened.

Now maybe I can decide on what to wear to work and get on with the day. Thanks for listening.

I love chocolate, can just manage mint and absolutely loathe the two flavours together – so I was really bracing myself for this one. The smell is deceptively rich, you get a perfect mix of both chocolate and mint and it was like burying my nose in a box of after-dinner mints. Fancy after-dinner mints mind, not those crappy chocolate mint biscuits Arnotts put out.
Unfortunately, the peppermint completely overwhelms all the other flavours. I couldn’t pick out the tea base, let alone the chocolate. This made for a very strange cup…

The last brew of this sample packet. This time it reminds me of an after-dinner Andes chocolate mint. It is a pretty good tea, and the mint is refreshing.