Chocolate & Ginger Spice

This sample packet contained a really interesting mixture. Bit chunky pieces of roasted chicory that looked like tree bark or mulch, red peppercorns, and what looked like little chocolate chips among a tan colored substance that must be the ginger. The dry mix smells like spicy mocha. It makes a thick looking brown liquor.

The aroma of the tisane smells like chocolate, coffee and pepper. I’m not really picking up on much ginger here. The taste is similar to the aroma. Lightly chocolately, lightly coffee-like, with a zing of pepper that stands out most of all. The ginger hangs on to the chicory and mellows it into a sweet coffee-like flavor with a ginger overtone.

It’s a really interesting flavor, one I haven’t come across in a tisane before. I could see wanting it every now and then, especially during colder months. It’s a little too unusual and slyly intense for more than occasional drinking, at least for me.

OK purists, shutter your eyes now. This is not real tea. This is a melange of roasted chicory, chocolate, pepper, and ginger. It brews up black like coffee with a strong ginger smell. In my teens I was quite taken with herbal experimentation and this smells like one of my experiments. It brings me back to my mispent youth. It tastes fairly close to coffee with a ginger chaser. It’s not terrible and I can see it as an option for evenings when I want something dark without the caffeine.

Okay, I’m not ashamed to say that I was deeply intimidated by this tea. When my TeaFrog box arrived, the only thing I smelled when I opened it was chocolate and spice — and it was all coming from this one sample bag. I wrapped the sample bag (unopened) in a second bag and put that in a cannister, and still that entire corner of my kitchen was overwhelmed by chocolate and spices. I made myself a cup tonight because it seemed like a good night for it, but also in a bit of self-defense!

I was surprised, then, to find that the steeping tea smelled hardly of chocolate at all. The predominant spice when dry had been ginger; brewing, the peppercorns met up with the ginger and began taking over. I was too impatient to steep it for very long, and began sipping it from a spoon right away. The tea itself is a reddish-brown, not dark but rather murky in a way that matches the spicy scent.

Hot, it tastes almost entirely of peppercorns, but it’s very smooth underneath (is this where the chocolate comes in?). There’s a peppery tingle on the tongue and a gingery tingle at the back of the mouth — this is not a tea that’s sitting still to be drunk! And I was quite right to wait until I had an evening to savor it, because this is a tea that demands my full attention while drinking. As it’s cooling, there’s a little more chocolate flavor coming through, almost like the peppercorns, having made their point, have decided to graciously back off a step and let the other ingredients have their say.

ETA: A second steeping, at five and a half minutes, brings out rather more chocolate; I would still call this a pepper tea with chocolate and ginger flavors, but it’s an interesting change. It’s also distinctly darker from the longer steeping.

And now the quandary: I want more of this tea, but I’m not sure I dare acquire an entire tin of it lest my entire kitchen wind up smelling as though my spice rack and my cocoa powder just staggered in together after a wild night on the town.

Ok… this tisane looks like fecal matter droppings. ’Nuff said.

This isn’t exactly a fruit or an herbal, but that’s the closest listed on the chart so that’s what I’ll go w/ even though 1/2TB doesn’t look like much since the chocolate pieces are so big.

Suprisingly this brews up quite dark- dark brown liquor w/ reddish tones. And it definitely smells like the ingredients. I can detect the red pepper, but it doesn’t burn my nose, it’s mostly chocolate and ginger.

I was expecting this to be flat w/o any tea in it, but it’s actually quite smooth. I think that’s cuz of the ginger and the red pepper. It’s almost coffee-ish in some ways, but still different enough to not be called coffee flavored. Would most likely be good with milk.