Professor Yeti

In my neck of the woods, it’s been raining. Not your average pitter-patter-on-the-rooftops friendly sort of rain, but a rain that pounds through your clothes, seeps into where you live, and generally makes life cold, damp, and miserable. The Weather Channel website has practically given up on daily forecasts, as they all blend together into a giant grey blotch. In light of this fact, I have begun drinking tea more than usual.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a tea drinker. My favorite is a good loose Earl Grey, or perhaps some green or oolong. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and lately I’ve turned to something a bit fresher and more inspiring: mint. Mint tea is a glorious experience that warms the insides, clears the head, soothes stuffed nasal passages, and (if you listen to the British) even helps the digestion. (Don’t listen to those Brits though — they think funny little plain cookies are good for the digestion as well.)

Having consumed mint tea in copious quantities for the past week or so, I’ve started to become curious as to which tea-makers have the most quality product. Thus, without further ado, I bring you Tea Time 2005, where five different brands of mint tea that you can find at any moderately well-stocked supermarket are put to the test. Leaf to leaf, bag to bag, the competition was fierce. I steeped each tea for equal amounts of time, and tasted each with the same spoon, using a saltine in between samples to cleanse the palette. In reality, the taste of most of these teas is pretty similar. But if you, like me, are looking forward to an indefinite amount of time staring out the window at an encroaching flood, don’t settle for second best. The contenders and how they fared:

Celestial Seasonings Peppermint
This tea had the most despicable packaging of all the brands tested. It may be peppermint, but that’s no reason to have a picture of little birds unraveling red and white candy sticks on the front of the box. Gag me with a teaspoon. True to its saccharine outside, this tea had the sweetest and most intense mint flavor. It was extremely smooth going down, and the mint taste stayed in my mouth for an exceptionally long time after consumption. The aroma, however, was totally cardboard and didn’t even hint at the intense mint joy that was about to hit the tongue. It seemed to prove that, while flavorful, this tea is probably more artificial than fresh.

Tetley Peppermint
Tetley has recently started selling their tea in round cardboard and plastic packaging, rather than the usual flimsy, rectangle boxes favored by most companies. They say this makes the tea stay fresh longer, but they are horribly mistaken on this point. Tetley was the least pleasing of all the brands tested. It had a flat, extremely artificial flavor. Initially I tasted strong mint, but it immediately disappeared from my mouth, with none of the pleasing after-effects of the other teas. While yes, it was very nice that the round bag fit perfectly in the mug, asthetics aren’t enough to win over this girl.

Bigelow Plantation Mint
Rather than being just a mint tea, Plantation Mint is a basic tea with mint added to it. For this reason, it was the only caffeinated tea tested, and is why I probably won’t be able to sleep until sometime tomorrow afternoon. As expected, it tasted the most like a regular black or green tea, with a darker and more subtle mint flavor. While it felt dull compared to the sensationalist stylings of the Celestial Seasonings, the mint tasted fresher, like leaves you could have picked from your backyard garden. You’ll probably love this tea if you like other, darker teas. If you prefer your tea to be an in-your-face flavor experience, however, look elsewhere.

Bigelow Mint Medley
OK, OK, I already reviewed one Bigelow tea. But this one seemed different enough to warrant its own category. Even the packaging of this tea is cool and refreshing, with a soothing green color behind a picture of a rushing waterfall. Mint Medley definitely returns us to the land of strong mint flavor that stays in your mouth after the tea is long gone, but it has a fresher, more earthy taste than the other flavorful teas tested. It’s an utterly satisfactory middle ground between Celestial Seasonings artificiality and Plantation Mint authenticity. Bigelow definitely has market domination in the mint tea category. It keeps it real.

Lipton Peppermint
I’ve always thought of Lipton as the generic store brand of teas. When you’re at a restaurant and ask the waitress what kinds of tea they have, and she looks confused and says, “Uh, you know, just tea,” Lipton is probably what they’ll bring you. So I didn’t think Lipton Peppermint would have much potential. But this review would be nothing if it didn’t bust up a few stereotypes, and Lipton surprised me in the end. Its flavor was strong and minty, with a suave cooling sensation that stuck around in the mouth. The taste was also surprisingly fresh, and less artificial than the Celestial Seasonings, with a better aroma. I would recommend it for people who still aren’t into tea enough to enjoy the Bigelow offerings, but don’t want to compromise their integrity and desire for freshness.

Overall, I’d give Bigelow a chance over any of the others. But the Lipton and the Celestial Seasonings also offered that soothing mint flavor in a slightly more commercial, but still satisfactory way. Only the ill-fated Tetley didn’t live up in the flavor department. And even Tetley wasn’t a horrible tea experience — it just paled when placed next to its stronger competitors. The moral of the story? With something as kickass as peppermint tea, you really can’t go wrong. So spread the gospel, get cozy in a warm corner of wherever you live, and start sipping. All together now…ready? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Erin Quigley (erin@professoryeti.com) has to pee like a racehorse after drinking all that tea.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 16th, 2005 at 9:38 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.