Vanilla Mint

Been sickly and this is the only tea sitting right with my tummy right now.

Golden Moon sample No. 10 of 31. Hard to believe I’m a third of the way through. What a fun ride this is. I’m glad I have 2/3 left to look forward to.

This one is making my pulse rate go up and my palms sweat a bit because it’s another green/black blend. My last GM green/black didn’t go so well and I was disappointed because for those who got the steeping right it seemed to be enjoyable. I think I steeped too hot last time, so this time I’m lowering the temperature. However, I’m still sweating a bit because now I fear I may be shortchanging the black part of the blend.

The dry blend is a mix of colors, shapes and textures that gives it a pleasing look. Bright green flecks of mint, dark brown spears of black tea, little dark green gunpowder spheres, and some brown shapes that are likely the vanilla bean pieces, though they are smaller and not as easily identifiable as in other vanilla flavored teas I have tried. The mint fragrance is similar to that of the Moroccan Mint. It’s those Girl Scout thin mints again! But it’s creamy in a way it wasn’t before, with the addition of the vanilla fragrance. I’m thinking mint ice cream now. There’s also a rich, slightly toasty, slightly malty undertone.

I’m going to try to hit 180 (tricky business with the Zo as it is between settings), and steep for 3 minutes. And dang, I missed it on the way down and on the way up as well. Oh well. I’ll use 175.

A clear, light amber infusion. The vanilla and the mint are evident in the aroma and about equally balanced, though the mint predominates slightly. There’s an intermittent cocoa note and a somewhat toasty green one as well.

Ah. This is better than my last green/black attempt. There is no harsh sensation in the back of my throat. I do notice the back of my throat while drinking this which is unusual and which is no doubt resulting from the power of suggestion. I wish I didn’t notice it, but I can’t be sure it’s the tea causing me to. The tea is minty tasting with a softness to it that must be the effect of the vanilla. There is also a sweet, “dark green” flavor from the gunpowder that is most evident in the finish. The black tea may be contributing to the sweetness as well.

Second steep with slightly hotter water, about F183 degrees. This is definitely more in the ballpark of the correct steeping temperature for this. The flavor is richer all around at this temperature, and the black tea is speaking up and contributing some maltiness in a way it wasn’t at 175.

I like this well enough, but I am not sure I’d need both this and the Moroccan Mint in my cabinet at the same time or whether they are similar enough that one would do. I’d really like to try them side by side to see.

I am so, so, so, so, SO not a fan of mint -

BUT!

this is a great tea!!! I am enjoying my cup even as a person who does not like mint! I wonder if it’s the vanilla softening it a touch? Maybe I like the gunpowder green tea? (I’ve never had it before! Must try the plain gunpowder to compare!). Maybe it’s because they used spearmint as well as peppermint and it’s not that overwhelming minty minty MINT mint? I am actually shocked that I’m enjoying this so much. I was really afraid that it would taste like toothpaste, but it does not at all.

I decided to resteep (5 min) and I was surprised on how dark, flavorful and delicious the resteep was! A touch of mint, and even some vanilla sweetness remains.

P.S. I placed my first round of Golden Moon ordering yesterday! Out of what I’ve tried in the last month, 6 teas made the must have tin purchase (and one – Kashmiri Chai – earned a half pound bag purchase!!!)! This tea is delicious and unique enough to make my cut for the second round of ordering! I have over a dozen more samples to taste for the first time, and I will admit to being a HUGE baby and putting the Pu-erh, Pu-erh Chai, and Lapsang Souchong into the Traveling Tea Box, so they are not part of the tastings (!!!!)

I tried this one iced- cold brew method using the Bodum pitcher from Golden Moon. Seriously, refreshing. The vanilla provides a smoothness, sweetness and tempers the mint. I am getting addicted to my Bodum iced tea pitcher. Just throw some leaves in water and voila, the next morning, cold iced tea….

So I totally didn’t look up this tea before I steeped it. Le sigh… I still really like it. Vanilla and mint happen to be two of my favorite flavors so I can’t really go wrong here.

The mint is nice pick me up right off the bat. Once the mint tires, the vanilla pops in, lingering for a bit. I get a hint of what I think is green tea. Towards the very end of my sip I can taste a hint of black tea. I agree with Dylan that it’s probably a mellow fellow tea. It reminds me of the Nonsuch estate that I had the other night.

Overall a great dessert tea, especially for lovers of vanilla and mint.

Mmm. Mint. Creamy mint. I am seriously going to keep the package around just so I can sniff at it. The mint feels so good in my nose. Mint is good. Not sure on the water temp (go brewing at work!) but I’m guessing around 195-ish. I let it cool for a minute or two before putting the leaves in. While I waited, I sniffed the package.

I also studied the dry leaves while I waited and kind of wish I hadn’t. The Gunpowder looks like mouse droppings. I feel like there has been a mouse wandering through my leaves. It’s bringing up bad memories of mouse droppings on my desk and a no-kill trap being chewed open and the forced use of a less-than-no-kill trap. Let’s just brew this up and forget all about mice.

Sadly, all brewed up this tea doesn’t smell as friendly to my sinuses as the leaf did. It’s sort of musty with a tinge of mint. As it cools a bit I get more mint and less musty. Maybe a hint of vanilla.

Sipping it tastes like a milder version of the 50/50 blend I do of Adagio’s spearmint herbal and cream-flavored black teas. I was going to say blander but it’s not. I think it’s got a bit more depth to the flavor. It’s actually nice but not what I was expecting based on the strong smell in the package. I get the vanilla most as I inhale while taking a sip and then there is a bit of mint-with-solidity-which-I’m-assuming-is-tea taste and then the whoosh of mint after I swallow.

This is nice and accomplishes what it sets out to do (be a creamy mint tea) but ultimately, I just don’t find it all that impressive.

I got this tea with the iced tea set. I bought the set for the Coconut Pouchong and the the iced tea pitcher and the Vanilla Mint was an added bonus. I like green and black tea blends, when they are combined with sweet vanilla mint it makes for a fantastic tea in multiple ways.

I first had the tea hot with no sugar. It has a sweet vanilla flavor with the cooling mint aftertaste. The mint can be tasted upfront in the tea, but it is the cooling mouth feel after that is the selling point.

The tea is also good hot with sugar, however the sugar actually makes it too sweet for me to enjoy.

However, my favorite way to enjoy this tea is iced. The flavors are the same, a rich green and black blend with vanilla and mint, but iced it is sweet, cool and refreshing.

This is a really refreshing blend. The tea base is both green and black tea, so the flavor is rich and sweet without being too bold. This allows the flavors of mint and vanilla to really shine through. The flavor is crisp and sweet and very pleasant.

Sweet, creamy and mint-alicious!! :) Tempered with a slightly bitter, almost tangy, green tea taste—overlaid with a toasty black tea. Refreshing yet cozy and warm. I love the vanilla in this—almost like creme brulee. Super yummy.

I received this in the mail today as part of a VERY generous swap from Azzrian. Thank you!

Still being fairly new to all of the different teas that are out there, I have a hard time not reacting like a playful little puppy. Every new tea I get that tastes good is like my new favorite person to play with. I haven’t tasted a tea this good since the last awesome tea I tasted! Now you’re my favorite tea. Now YOU’RE my favorite tea! To sort of ‘leash’ my inner puppy, I’m sloooowly drinking this tea, and writing towards the end of the cup.

There’s a lot to like about this tea. The mint flavor is very tasty, but not overpowering. After the first flavor rush, the mint smooths down and allows the vanilla to shine through a little more. Underneath both of those, hiding ever so delicately is the flavor of the green tea. The black tea doesn’t have much room to come through, and I feel like it may be a more mellow black tea to begin with.

I’ve never had a black/green blend before, and we actually brewed this one a little hot and long for green tea, which gave it the tiniest hint of bitterness in the background. That’s our own fault though, nothing to blame the tea for. Our next go at this one, and we’re going to go with a lower temp and less time… see how that works out.

This is my first Golden Moon Tea, and I have a sampler pack from them coming soon. If the samples I get are up to this level of quality, it will definitely be a company I’m interested in buying from in the future. This cup of tea went by really quick, and we keep fairly large cups around here :)

Thanks again to Azzrian for the swap!

Simple. Mint & Vanilla.
Why do I always think of toothpaste when I smell Mint tea’s?
I have no idea, but this was pretty refreshing this morning, so I will give it a thumbs up.

This tea is seriously insane on the membrane, y0. My taste buds and mind are having a difficult time keeping up.

First off, in the bag, this one smells So. Good. Neither the gunpowder nor the black tea really stand out in the aroma, but the vanilla and the mint… they create this dual symphony of sweet and fresh. My nose could detect the warmth of the vanilla, mixed with the menthol-cool of the mint. I couldn’t stop sniffing it. Seriously amazing.

The leaves are pretty damned gorgeous, too. Wiry blacks and stick-like-chocolate-colored vanilla blended against vibrant peppermint leaves and rolled blue-green gunpowder. If I was an interior designer on HGTV, I could see using a similar color palette for a room. Do not go out and do this. I potentially have no taste in design.

Golden Moon suggests doing this one up at boiling, but I thought potentially that’d be a bad idea. Gunpowder’s a pretty hardy green, but it’s still a green tea, and I didn’t want to scortch the leaves. At the same time, I didn’t want the black tea taste to suffer from sub-par temperature. I decided to hit a middle ground of 190, and watched the dance. There was a lot going on in the pot. The gunpowder was popping and unfurling, the peppermint was pretending it was in a snowglobe, and the black tea un-wired itself. Very neat.

The infusion on this one smells more vanilla than mint, with a cool feeling to the nostrils like you’ve inhaled the polar icecaps. I love the smell of mint.

Anyway, on the taste, my mouth nearly went SYSTEM INOPERATIVE and shut down. Overload. Seriously. I don’t even know where to start. GM is pretty smart, because I think they just took their Madagascar Vanilla and then mixed it with Moroccan Mint. And somehow created a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The first taste you get is a bit of peppermint herbal-ness, followed by a mix of malty-cocoa-black and the faintest wisp of a gunpowder-like smokiness. If any flavor component comes across the least, it’s the gunpowder. Which I wasn’t surprised about at all, considering the robustness of the other components. This gives way to a very sweet vanilla component, that quickly becomes overrun by peppermint freshness. It finishes with vanilla, and the menthol-effects of the mint. There’s a green-like gunpowder aftertaste too.

I don’t even know if that all makes sense, but that’s how it is. It’s like this grab bag of tea, but you don’t need to work hard to taste all of the flavors. It’s not subtle in the least. But it’s all very smooth with barely any astringency at all, and while the tea teeters on the edge of being muddled and confusing, it manages to stay on the right side of goodness.

I seriously like this one better than both the Moroccan Mint and the Madagascar Vanilla, since the combination seems to cancel out the shortcomings of the both of them. The vanilla is no longer heavy and artificial when the mint comes in, and the gunpowder is softened by the vanilla. Really interesting overall, and sorry if this review was rambling! Cause this tea rambled all over the place.

The smell is just that…Vanilla and Mint.
The taste is also both.
The Description couldn’t be more clear…and it stands up to it.

This is okay, I think I would like it stronger. But I’m not really a fan of black/green mixes. The mint and vanilla are both really good, I just wish there was more to the tea flavor.

On the plus side I got my boyfriend to drink some of this :O PROGRESS. It probably wasn’t the best of things though getting to this point started with some tea at a Chinese restaurant last night.

How fresh! Added a teensy bit of agave nectar for sweetness, and this makes me feel oddly… French? This tea is sophisticated and classy, almost amber in color, with a creamy soft complexion, but can easily wear four inch heels the entire day. And possibly slash your tire with the heel. (Elegantly. Without you noticing.)

This is the blonde wearing dashing red lipstick that your mother warned you about, who pouts her lips and goes, “Oops.” None of the flavors are overpowering, and even on the second steep, I find this tea holds up decently.

But methinks that the complexity of this tea may ultimately be its downfall and its strength — black tea and green tea and mint and vanilla and a little bit of this and that. After all, everyone likes a classy affair. A woman is like a tea bag — you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

Yesterday I took a break from trying new teas – I just needed a day of things that I’m guaranteed to like. So this morning I was back to being adventurous and felt full of vim ‘n vigor regarding new teas. I did Ewa’s patented “GM Indecision Buster Grab Basket-o-Fun” for the first time and came up with this. I have nothing against neither mint nor vanilla, but then I saw “gunpowder” and what’s left of my soul grew cold. I had a very bad experience with GM’s Gunpowder (which I’m pretty sure was user error) and I really didn’t want to start my day off with a cup of nasty. But, I had to go with my own made-up rules involving the “GMIBGBoF” and so I steeped this puppy.

The packet itself smelled like an anemic after dinner mint. I was not encouraged. And then it happened. In my not-a-morning-person state of cavewomanness I didn’t notice that I had left my kettle set for tisanes until after it started to go. And I couldn’t bring myself to stop it and start over. So I went with it. I actually think that it worked out well for me!

This tea was an utterly pleasant surprise. I think its description pretty much nails it. I wasn’t so sure with my first few sips, but as the tea cooled I felt myself getting that “nomish” feeling. So with my first few sips I don’t think that I would’ve bought this, but with the cooler tea I couldn’t help but think what an amazing iced tea this could be. So it’s now on the short list of future GM purchases.

Oh, and I was shocked at how many fannings were at the bottom of my cup. At first I thought “Holy Crap! How did three tea leafs get through my ultra-fine infuser?!?!” And then I realized that those “leafs” were actually fannings in a tea mosh pit. Second steeping there were quite a few as well. I’m just not a fanning fan, and so I tossed the very last tiny bit of tea in my cup. NE

Made this sample last night. Really soothing hot, but OMG much better iced IMO!
The vanilla is perfectly balanced and the mint is just right, not so over the top that you feel you are drinking mint chewing gum, it feels pleasant in my mouth. I have never been a fan of green tea, but this combo with the black tea is a win win for me. The pleasantness of a green without the grassy notes and the comfort of a black tea without the bitterness. I wish I had sampled this before I placed a GM order, but there is always next time:)

Golden Moon Sampler Tea #6:
After running around campus all day handing out conference fliers, I was really in the mood for something refreshing, but I also wanted to try something completely new and interesting. Green and black tea with mint and vanilla? Sounds like a winner to me! Provided it pulls it off, of course.

This tea is wonderful! I’m not sure I can do a description of the taste justice, but it starts with a core of mint that seems surrounded by a layer of vanilla, surrounded by a hint of black tea, finishing off with the taste of green. At least, I think that’s what I got out of it. I finished the cup in the space of about three minutes, so I can’t really be sure. The mixture of black and green makes this tea light and ensures that the two flavors, which are usually quite overpowering enough on their own don’t dominate the tea – I think the green especially serves to smooth everything out.

I still have some left over in the teapot and I am really tempted to chill it and see what it tastes like iced. Unfortunately, we recently had a pretty nasty kimchee (one of my roommates is Korean) spill in the fridge, so that is probably a bad idea. Maybe I’ll just leave it overnight? It does get pretty chilly at night here.

Definitely need more of this.

I can’t believe that I’m first again!! This is really, really nice. It reminds me a lot of the creme de mint Altoids. Kind of tastes like you made a cup of really good tea and put in creme de mint altoids to sweeten it. (I’m drinking it sweetened, I just prefer my tea that way.) As the tea base is a mix of gunpowder green and black tea, it can take the vanilla and the mint flavors and still come through.

I like this, and may order of a tin of it someday after I reduce my tea inventory somewhat.

Another sample I received from them yesterday (only two left). Opening the package I instantly smell mint and vanilla, like a creme de menthe. The wet leaves, which are very disappointingly broken little things, smell like an Andy’s candy:chocolate and mint. I brewed this up at 175 instead of boiling because of the green tea in it. The package says boiling but I’m always afraid to bitter the green tea. It came out nice and smooth, the vanilla tempers the mint a bit and at first all I could taste was mint, black tea with a vanilla like aftertaste. Now that it’s starting to cool I can taste the green tea, it’s gunpowder green tea, I know that smokiness just about anywhere. I can definitely taste the flavors more as it cools, I would like to try this iced but I would have to buy more considering that I find that I have to use their entire sample to make a 10oz pot or cup. But it’s good and if I buy from them again this will be on the list!