Balade a Shanghai

Went out for a wonderful dinner tonight. I ate far too much and still came home with enough food for my lunch tomorrow. Oy!

Since I had over indulged I decided to skip dessert and coffee at the restaurant and have this at home instead. It’s a nice Moroccan Mint. I like that the mint doesn’t overwhelm the tea. I do wish there was more smokiness from the gunpowder green, but the tea was still nice without it. For people who want to try Moroccan Mint but don’t like smokey teas this could be a great option.

This isn’t my favorite Moroccan Mint, but it is a good one.

Thank you Nina’s Paris for this fantastic sample!

The dry leaf has an intoxicating spearmint fragrance that is absolutely fantastic. I love spearmint things so I’m assuming already that I’ll thoroughly enjoy this tea.

Yummy! It’s a refreshing, soothing tea. Something that I’d imagine would be wonderful iced for a warm spring day. This is a perfect “de-stressing” tea, because to me, spearmint helps me relax!

I’m getting through these Nina’s samples, and they’ve all been pretty good. Some great.

This is a smoky gunpowder with mint.

Baladé is the french word for walk, but it’s also the name of a Lebonese restaurant in New York City. That’s very fitting, because to drink tea with mint is a very Arabic thing to do. More precisely, drinking tea with mint and rose water is a very very Arabic thing to do. That’s how I’m enjoying this tea right now. Insha’Allah

Let’s try this again. My computer is having a little temper-tantrum and shutting off on me again. Oh well.

I was expecting a plain green tea with this one, but when I poured my water over it I thought I smelled mint. I was correct and my first sips were mint. It was a plain mint. Nothing really stood out about it. It had a nice toothpaste clean mouth feel after it. But I wasn’t really tasting the green tea.

It cooled down a little bit and the green tea finally stood up. You can still taste the mint, but it isn’t as strong as it was at the beginning of the cup. It is slightly astringent. When it cools more you can really feel it at the back of your throat.

I’m not sure I like it as much as I did when I first took a sip. The green tea is a little rough for me this time and the mint is having a strange aftertaste in the back of my throat. It is nice and light and delicate. I think I would drink this with smaller cups though instead of in the big mugs of tea I normally have.

So, I don’t think I would go out and buy it for myself, but it is nice to drink. I like their Japon tea better.

Edit: So people are classifying this as a Moroccan mint type of tea? That’s interesting because I keep thinking of how nice it would be to mix this with my gunpowder green to see how it would turn out. That’s funny!

After having cold 911 by Davids tea I am always worried that mint in tea is going to be super strong and overpower the actual tea. That was not the case with this tea at all. Although the mint was fairly strong it was not overpowering. I enjoyed this as a change of pace from straight green tea. Im on the fence if I would purchase this one as I like Nina’s other blends more. However if you like a little mint flavour this is worth a try. Nice to sip on this cold afternoon.

On a side note I think I used a bit too high of water temperature to steep the tea…..very slightly bitter because of this. Time to invest in a thermometer I guess. :)