BlueKittyMeow

Wow, this smells delicious! So nutty and smooth.
The scent brewed is very chocolaty with hazelnut also being a very strong scent – it actually kind of reminds me of nutella.
The yerba mate keeps it from tasting heavy – it still has the grassy hay like flavours. The flavours that I had scented are more in the background, they just make it very smooth. It actually overall has a very light nearly mineral flavour.

It had much less of a noticeable scent to it than I was expecting. It smelled rather like hay that had been used and damp – in a good way!
After brewing, it had a very musty fishy/manure kind of scent. Again, not unpleasant, just very different.
I almost forgot to rinse this and poured a whole cup, so technically my first cup was a full second infusion.
The scent of it on my first actual brewing was much smoother than the rinse scent. It was far less fishy and much more appealing.
It had an incredibly wonderfully full mouth feel, but the flavour seemed really lacking to me. It was ever so slightly astringent and I didn’t taste much of anything like what I smelled. That was kind of disappointing.
I really wanted to like this from the scent, but it really just had very little taste. I ended up adding some creamer just to finish it.

My first impression of the scent of the leaves was wow! I loved the scent. I was kind of expecting to be scared off, on the basis of what I’ve heard other say, but I love the scent. Very green and herby, in a much fresher and livelier and more zingy way than with green tea. My mother thought it smelled like catnip in the bag.
It smelled sweet to me.
And the taste! It was so smooth and almost sweet!
A few sips in I noticed some astringency and a kind of grassy hay like flavour (again, totally different from those flavours in green tea).
The aftertaste kind of reminds me of rooibos – a kind of sweet, not sweet lingering flavour.
I did a second infusion guessing at the proportions (I lost some of the leaves while filtering them out. Water: 150 degrees Time: 6 minutes.

This was really interesting. I love rooibos and that is what I was initially comparing it to. When I first smelled the loose leaves, I was kind of baffled – it smelled rather sweet, but also had some other scent I couldn’t really define that was strange (some kind of earthy scent?)
My first brew, I think I added slightly too much water for the amount of leaves. The first cup was different from what I was expecting from the scent. The initial flavours weren’t necessarily sweet but the aftertaste was. It does have kind of a fruity scent and the taste almost has overtones like an herbal fruit tea.
I found that as it cooled, it seemed to taste sweeter and to become less astringent (negligibly so). The scent really seemed to get much sweeter and open up.

ETA: I made a second infusion of this and it actually still tasted pretty good. I steeped it for around 10 minutes which I think really helped make the second cup taste close to the first. The scent was just as strong as the first cup. The flavour was more subtle but still there.
But wow this makes me tired. There is no way I am ever drinking this in the middle of the day. I don’t actually know if I like the way in which this made me sleepy. I feel like I’ve had the world’s longest day.

I made three infusions of this. The first one was just so-so. It had more of a bitter note than I was expecting. I liked the second brewing better – it was a little less bitter and had more of the umami of the 100% artichoke tea I’ve had before. The third infusion had very litter flavour – the second was by far the best and the most interesting.