Hello and Happy New Year Fellow Steepsters!
I know I’m not a regular poster…I was starting to when I joined the site in 2014, but then my personal plans took over my life. The good news is that I got what I needed to do done – college upgrade complete and divorce done. The bonus is that I got engaged to my long-time fiance in early December, and a few days later, landed a fantastic job! I am now a full-fledged visiting nurse. :)
Now that I have a more stable schedule, I’m getting back to living life and doing the things I enjoy, two of which are writing and being an amateur tea connoiseusse!
On to the review.
Snow day – I got this on a whim, having taken advantage of the semi-annual sale at David’s Tea. The smell of the tea reminds me of After Eight/Mint Ovation chocolate, which I inhaled as a kid (weird, I know). I also figured that this tea would be similar to Teavana’s White Chocolate Peppermint.
Boy was I wrong.
First sipdown last weekend – brewed using 1 PS (perfect spoon) in boiling water, steeped for 4 minutes, no sweetener. In a word, yuck. The taste was not only chemical but there was some weird bitterness as well. I was quite disappointed and had considered going back to the store and asking if I could swap this with another tea.
Then I remembered that Teavana sweetens their samples and thought, “Why not?”
I had better success with this last night. I used slightly less than 1 PS, boiling water and steeped for 2 minutes as opposed to 4. There is still that weird chemical/bitter taste but it is a little more tolerable this time when using Teavana’s rock sugar. For this first batch I used 1 PS of rock sugar (a little too sweet but better than drinking it straight!).
Tonight I decided to brew a teapot of this. Slightly less than 2 PS of tea, boiling water, 2 PS of rock sugar, steeped at 2 minutes. Again, it’s palatable but not amazing. I much prefer Teavana’s White Chocolate Peppermint (of which I bought a healthy amount at 30% off, woot woot!).
I really thought that this would compete with Teavana’s tea, so I foolishly got 100g of this. Needless to say, there’s SNOW way (see what I did there) I will get this again. Perhaps to help me get rid of this batch I’ll give a couple people a fairly generous sample…
Flavors: Bitter, Peppermint
