Moroccan Mint

Yum! I wish I had ordered some of this when I placed my order on Friday. I always see peppermint in teas, but this is the first spearmint.

It pairs really well with the gunpowder green tea. My mouth is both warmed by the tea and refreshed by the mint. Interesting!

I realize that most of my reviews (maybe all of them?) are related to food and /or what I did the day I wrote them. Today won’t be any different, sorry!

In the beautiful region of The Laurentians, where I feel so privileged to be living in, there’s a little shop called Le Moulin aux Épices (it means The Spice Mill). I don’t go very often cause it’s a long drive.

Nathalie, the owner, welcomes you in the small cottage style boutique adjacent to her own house. Entering her shop is like walking the ground of the old world Silk Road. It just transports you to exotic lands. Name any spice, she has it.

Along with tea addiction, I suffer from olfactory obsession. The place is not helping me!

I always pick up something that she recommends. This time I came back with some Indonesian long pepper. Shaped as a mini pinecone, this peppercorn exudes perfumes of liquorice and aniseed. I used it tonight in a moroccan Tajine dish. Mmmmm!

What better tea than moroccan mint to end the meal. This is really good, if your a mint lover of course.

I love that Zen Tea is using spearmint instead of peppermint. My all time favourite mint tea consists of adding hot water to a load of freshly cut spearmint. So simple, you just drink and let the vibrant green leaves swirl around. Beautiful to look at and equally tasty.

In this tea, the spearmint provides a natural sweet finish to this fresh combination. I choose to brew it at only 175F. Over that, I find the gunpowder renders a dusty aftertaste that I dislike very much, a taste of dirt almost. I know it doesn’t sound appealing, but trust that it completely goes away when brewed at a very low temperature.

Now this is nowhere near traditional moroccan tea, which is almost unbearably sweet to me since always loaded with sugar. I much prefer these moroccan mint blends, but I wish I had a bottle of orange blossom water handy to make it closer to tradition. That, I really like and I think I might just try it next time!

Another sample from my Zen order. A change of pace with spearmint! I’m not sure if Moroccan Mint teas usually have peppermint or spearmint, but this might be my only spearmint tea. At some point I liked spearmint more than peppermint, but peppermint makes headaches disappear, so there you go. This is certainly refreshing and tasty. Plenty of spearmint flavor… so much so, that it tends to overpower the green tea and I can’t really taste that at all for either steep. Very good if you like spearmint, but not for those who are searching for that gunpowder flavor itself.
Steep #1 // 32 minutes after boiling // 2 1/2 min steep
Steep #2 // 25 minutes after boiling // 3-4 min steep