Arthur Dove – Mint Choc Chip
Chocolate peppermint tea is a tricky business. I am – as you know – a big fan of dessert trolley-inspired tea blends and any brew with aspirations to be a mint choc Vienetta is a tea I want to be friends with.
The tricky part to navigate is the constant source of unminty disappointment that is dried peppermint leaves. To me, dried peppermint leaves don’t taste like peppermint. They taste like cabbage. (Lest you think I subscribe to some kind of “peppermint doesn’t taste of peppermint” conspiracy theory, I am more than happy to accept that both fresh peppermint leaves and peppermint oil have all the Polo-minty taste one could reasonably expect from a peppermint plant.)
When I opened this pack of Arthur Dove Mint Choc Chip tea, I gave it a hearty sniff and was gratified to be whacked in the face with the pungent aroma of After Eight mints. “This,” I said to myself, “is going to be good.” And it is good. It’s a rather nice chocolate peppermint tea. It’s just … well, those pesky dried peppermint leaves do cabbage things up a bit.
The ingredients here are Sri Lankan black tea, peppermint, cocoa shells, cocoa nibs, stevia and natural flavouring. I assume that the flavourings are taking care of the nice-tasting peppermint bit. So what you have here, is a tasty black tea with the flavours of chocolate, mint and iron-rich brassica vegetables, which, let’s face it, is the sort of ice cream flavour that Heston Blumenthal would come up with. And like, I imagine, many dishes on the Fat Duck menu, it’s surprisingly palatable.
I appreciate that not everybody has the same issues that I do with dried mint. And to be fair, Arthur Dove’s Mint Choc Chip tea is probably aimed more at them. I still had fun, though. Plus, I had the added bonus of feeling that, by drinking this tea, I could tick off one of my five-a-day.
Today’s featured book is A Room Full Of Chocolate by Jane Elson.
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