Vanilla Mint

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.

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.

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.

Delicious tea! So relaxing and vanilla with hint of mint.

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.

This one is rich and creamy vanilla and mint in just the right amounts. It tastes great hot and iced. I have had this one about 3 times and it truly is a quality tea. Yum!

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