Candy Cane

Thank you to Emilie for this big sample! This really smells like candy canes and a bit of cherry…like the chocolate gooey cherrys from Christmas that you pop in your mouth as a kid and almost get sick on…yes those ones!
Well, today it LOOKS like rain. We had 81 degrees yesterday and today it might rain for the first time since the end of August!!! Skiers will be glad to get some new powder snow in the higher up’s! Good weather for peppermint tea. I brewed this fragrant pot up and took a big sweet slurp (add sweetening please). Tasted like a paper dry peppermint stick with a cherry finish and was less cherry than expected. Fell kinda flat. This tea needed something more. When a recipe needs tweeking you tweek it right?! I KNOW you guys add stuff to your not-so-great tea. Spy’s are watching! I add things too. The comments about “Oh I wish it had a little more lemon”, or “Why isn’t there some chocolate?”…well, I see you scurring to the cupboard for the chocolate and to the frig for lemon. Can’t fool me! I went to the DARK SIDE! (where else would you expect me to go?) I added a pinch of Lapsang Soochong. I wanted to make the peppermint cherry SMOKIN! It was just small enough an amount to make it interesting and give depth. I liked it. This is something I have done before to play with my tea. Call me crazy. (I know you do!)

Received this tea in an exchange. I absolutely love the atmosphere of Christmas time and all the yummy edibles at that time. So I love finding teas and other drinks that bring back that feeling at any time of the year. I had high hopes for this tea. However, when I opened it, I wasn’t hit with the minty smell I was expecting. No, there was a very strong smell of cherry cold medicine. It turns out, there are dried cherries in this tea. The cherries overwhelm any sense of the peppermint. After steeping, the mint smell was just detectable over the weakened cold medicine smell. However, the taste is quite the opposite. The very first taste is an overwhelming minty-ness. The mint fades away right at the end, so that I barely get a taste of tea. The aftertaste is just barely fruity, but I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t already known the cherries were there. Very pepperminty, but doesn’t have that candy cane flavor. I think this would be good just as a mint tea, but I went in expecting candy canes, which I did not get.