Tea Review: Trader Joe Chocolate Mint Black Tea

I have dozens and dozens of teas to review, but as fate would have it, it’s another Trader Joe tea that drew the assignment! This is a relatively new addition to their line-up, a flavored tea bag mix, the Chocolate Mint Black Tea! You get 20 tea bags per box. The price is $2.49 per box. [updated]

The taste is as the name suggests, you get a reasonably good mix of the three advertised flavors (chocolat-i-ness, mint-i-ness, black-tea-ness) ~ considering the price. There are various Natural Flavors, in addition to the tea leaves (peppermint, black, spearmint) and the various chocolate-y ingredients (cocoa bean shells, carob pods and such) and glueware (sunflower oil in the roasted chicory). So definitely not something for a tea purist 🙂

Given the mix of ingredients, it does not have as much caffeine as a typical bag of black tea simply because there are a lot of other things in the tea bag, so you get a lot less black tea comparatively. Which brings us to a customization. If you find the flavor too strong or want more caffeine or a more “black tea” flavor, you can brew one bag of this with a bag of your favorite black tea to give it a tea-boost 🙂

Each individual tea bag is sealed in a clear thin bag, making it a good candidate for sharing with friends, or splitting the order, or having a few with you at work or in a bag or something like that.

TRIGGER WARNING: if you hate staples in tea bags, unfortunately this has two per tea bag. One holds the tea tag to the string, the other holds the string to the tea bag. SAD!

ORIGINS

There is no mention of where the ingredients were sourced from other than a “Product of Canada” and a long paragraph saying this was “crafted in Quebec”. The black tea is definitely not from Quebec since it is too frozen to have tea plantations there 🙂

BREWING INSTRUCTIONS

The brewing instructions are as expected, those of black tea. I tried different times, including random and forgot-about-it and left it grandpa-style without ruining it. The included instructions are a good starting point, and then you can customize it to taste 🙂

PACKAGING

As with a lot of Trader Joe products, the packaging has “personality”. It is fairly thin colored cardboard, so avoid crushing it 🙂 Some of the artwork may be re-purposable for scrap-booking or collages other DIY art-related projects! For example, the lovely bird below:

COMING UP

The weather has not been co-operating, so I haven’t had a chance to make iced tea out of this yet. I will add a section once I drink a few iced.

Next up, a comparison of various chocolate-y teas. This may take weeks/months, so don’t hold your breath 🙂

2 thoughts on “Tea Review: Trader Joe Chocolate Mint Black Tea”

  1. as far as health, do you think this tea is OK to drink? The repeated “natural flavors” listed ingredient has me concerned! 🙂

    Thanks for the review!

    1. Thanks for the comment!

      I am not an expert on nutrition/health, so this is only what I do personally: in an ideal world, I’d rather avoid “natural flavors” and other iffy ingredients. But I have to make practical compromises since natural flavors are in so many foods and drinks. For example, even the RxBars whose cornerstone is being made of basic real food ingredients also have natural flavors.

      With tea, if I like the tea flavor, I don’t let the natural flavors get in the way. But if it’s a 50-50 tea (or worse), then it tilts the scales towards avoiding it.

      The other thing is what kind of tea it is. For example, if it is a desserty type of tea like this, I can accept natural flavors more than it if it was plain loose leaf tea that randomly gets a natural flavor added to the leaves.

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