Spearmint

Since I have gone absolutely crazy with Chinese black and green teas for the last week, I haven’t been sleeping well. In order to fend off the jitters, I decided to detox for a few days and picked out a nice range of tisanes to help get me through it. This organic spearmint from the The Tao of Tea was first in the lineup.

I steeped one teaspoon of this in 200 F water for 5 minutes. The infused liquor was a delicate, pale gold. A strong menthol aroma was easy to detect on the nose, but there was something else there too, almost like a mixture of straw and licorice. In the mouth, a strong spearmint taste was present (as one would expect), but there were some other faint flavors too. I thought I detected a little bit of straw, cream, and licorice.

Honestly, while I absolutely adore peppermint tea, I am not a huge fan of spearmint tea. To me, spearmint is too sweet and lacks sufficient character to succeed on its own. Also, the fact that I get a little bit of licorice flavor in the mouth bugs me. I really hate licorice and don’t feel like that flavor should be there. In the end though, I’m going to go easy on this one in terms of numerical rating because I’m not huge on spearmint and I’m not really sure I could pick a good spearmint tea if I tried. At least this one offers a little more in terms of flavor than just spearmint.