This Organic and Fair Trade blend is made of a light Ceylon (Sri Lankan) green tea, Egyptian mint leaves and stevia leaves (for a natural sweetness). Since the tea is in teabags I can’t see the leaves.

The liquor brews a nice light amber-gold and provides a nice minty aroma which helps to clear the senses.

The brew is minty itself, though not as brisk as most mint teas, which I assume is from the stevia leaves.

I would recommend this blend to fans of mint teas, lighter green teas and those who commonly add some form of sweetener to their brews.

If you’re relatively against using bagged teas, definitely forego this tea as the flavor is likely to be stronger from a loose tea version.

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Friday is Black Tea, Floral Tea, Fruit Tea, Chai and Pu’erh Review Day!

My palate needs a fresh cuppa! When that happens I like to step into a blend which will not only satiate my need for drink, but also freshen up my taste buds. In this case, I grabbed Tavalon’s Indian Mint.

Mint can have a really interesting collection of effects. At once balancing and envigorating it also freshens and enlivens the senses!

The blend of moroccan mint and broken sized first flush Darjeeling from Tavalon brews up with a light blood-amber liquor which smells of mint with hints of a natural earthiness I’ve come to enjoy from this tea.

The flavor is very reminiscent of an Andes mint and comes out minty and lightly astringent but with an understated creaminess and hints of chocolate flavors.

This tea has an unusually long tail on the finish which retains its fervor over time.

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I recommend this tea to fans of mint teas, Andes mints, York peppermint patties and fresh breath.

What exactly spurred me to sign up for the World Tea Expo is something I can’t reveal much about at the moment, asside from the fact that it does indeed relate to The Project.

I learned something while out in Las Vegas… though it wasn’t related to gambling, adult inhibitions or travelling. Indelibly I learned that my greatest strength and passion is, and likely has always been, with people. What makes us tick individually. It turns out that this year’s World Tea Expo, for me, ended up being all about the people.

While Saturday certainly marked a wonderful close to a beautiful and full day of tea related adventues… it was the people I met that day which truly energized me. The wonderfully high quality teas and the colorful array of accessories were really only icing on the cake.

I ate breakfast Sunday at the Roundtable All-Day Buffet at the Excalibur. The buffet was just $25 to come and go for as many trips as you’d like within a 24 hour period. My dietician would have been aghast at the prospect if she knew… but what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas… right? I actually ended up eating rpetty well there. Fruit, eggs and grapefruit juice were what appealed to me and I chose rather appropriate portion sizes. In case you’re wondering… I did go back for lunch and dinner… but I had a middle meal during a Tweetup I’ll mention later.

Sunday and Monday were where it was all at. Two more sessions: “Selling Your Tea Online Successfully” and “Creating A Menu With Cost & Creativity in Mind” bisected my morning and afternoon. Both presentations were steller! I couldn’t have been more pleased with the investment I made in paying for these two sessions.

Michael Cramer of Adagio Teas covered a wealth of great information related to community building… engaging and keeping your customers on your website and helping with conversion of simple visitors into customers who buy your products.

Melinda Decker, owner of LaTeaDa Tea Room in Clinton, IL provided an interesting presentation as well. While her ideas mostly focussed on her more traditional Victorian style tea house… she provided a number of robust and reusable ideas for making the most out of the materials you buy, simply by using the same ingredients to make multiple products… such as a cake, cobbler or pie being turned into a dessert in a glass.

I spent the rest of Saturday, literally networking with people. Hitting booths, talking people up over tea, getting my business cards handed out and really just getting to know people.

I ran into Jack Cheng of Steepster.com, Lindsey Goodwin of VeeTea, The fine guys over at Village Tea, Ty Beddingfield of Gamila… the inventors of the Tea Stick and a plethor of other completely wonderful folks on Sunday. Several of these folks, plus Ilya from Adagio Teas showed up for an evening Tweetup after the expo floor closed and we had some grub and drinks. In particular, Ty and I really talked for a while about ideas and things. A wonderful day.

After dinner Sunday night, I hit up Cherry, a dance club over in the Red Rock Hotel. This club was one hell of an experience! I thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent there dancing and admiring the crowd. I really get energized when a club is as alive as Cherry was that night. Rare I think, for a Sunday night.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is up… but I’ve been awake for hours already. To protect myself some from JetLag I have always tried to awaken as close to Eastern time as possible. I worked out in the rather meager (by my standards) health club in the Excalibur… an amazingly expensive $20 a day on top of the room bill.

After breakfast at the buffet again, I made my way over to the expo for some tea and my morning session: “Reaching Beyond Your Front Door For Additional Income” and then on to my afternoon session: “Price it Right & Sell it Smart.”

Ronald Eng of Kopius Teas put on a wonderful presentation. Very well spoken with great diction and clarity. His ideas were understandably expressed and he was very energetic about answering questions. A serial entrepreneur, Ronald had some great ideas and concepts to share.

Robert Hedrick of Holton & Heath also had some great insights on proper pricing, commodity vs exclusive and the power of branding potential. This was a also a very good presentation.

The rest of my “day” on Monday was spent scurrying around making my final connections with brands and companies, procurring more business cards in exchange for mine as an attempt to build more outlets and opportunities for me to grow with the tea industry over the next couple decades.

I did end up linking with Ronald Eng and Emilie Yanagi of Kopius Teas, the people at Zojirushi North America, a couple great folks over at TeasEtc, Maria Warman from Art of Tea and I cannot forget Nora of Golden Star Tea who has an amazing sparkling bottled tea beverage presented in a chapagne bottle!

At the end of the day I ran into May King of the new UK tea brand, MayKing Tea as well as a few other friends including Norman who is starting a tea garden in Hawaii! I ended up going out dancing with these two and we had a wonderful time out at Margaritaville down the strip after throwing back a few drinks at Liquidity, a bar in the Luxor Hotel & Casino.

I don’t want to leave anyone out… but I’m HORRIBLE with names… I ended up meeting several hundred people at the expo and coming away with some great friendships made over the three day event.

I have to recommend this event to anyone starting a new tea business, or anyone already in the industry!

I’ve already made the decision to head back to Las Vegas next year for another round of tea education. Maybe by then I’ll already have a small presence in the tea industry and be ready for some thoughts on expanding to becoming a tea brand. Here’s to the future!

Help a good cause: CharityWater.org

Tuesday is Iced Tea Review Day!

A month ago I announced I would begin reviewing Iced Teas in addition to hot teas. In fact, I am so excited about this, I’ve devoted an entire day to the concept through the end of Summer. I found this great little company called Sweet Leaf Tea based in Austin, Texas.

The first thing I noticed about this USDA Organic iced tea was the stunning honey gold color of the liquid in the bottle. Well, that’s not really true. The first thing I noticed was actually the artwork on the bottle of a little old woman. Based on the box flap description of the company I might presume the image is to resemble “Mimi” the grandmother of Clayton, one of the founders. The other founder’s name is David.

Before popping the ice cold bottle open, I took a look at the calories and ingredients. I’ve been working on losing some weight so this information is of interest to me now more than in the past. Calories aren’t usually something hot tea drinkers need to worry much about, but iced teas usually contain sugar or syrup and can sometimes be rather unhealthy.

It’s always confused me when companies note a service size of one of these beverages is smaller than the bottle in which they ship the product in. They obviously know we’re not going to drink just half the bottle. However, in this case you get two servings per 16oz bottle, which is broken into “cups,” an average serving size for beverages here in the States.

Each serving is 60 calories making the bottle just 120 calories. Much better than many other brands.

Popping that little bottle open after giving it a good shake (to get the good stuff mixed in) I was impressed with how the sweet mint erupted from the bottle. The aroma was at once clean and vibrant with hints of honey. But the mint clearly stood out tempting me to take the first sip.

This tea is extraordinarily light for an iced tea. I wouldn’t call it subtle. More docile than anything else, there’s virtually no boldness at all.

The flavor though… wow. As subdued as this tea’s boldness is, it’s flavor is forefront. The mint clearly grips the palate and opens the pores for the sweetness of the organic honey and the small amount natural cane sugar. Sweet, but with a mint bite to it. This tea has clearly become one of my favorite chilled beverages.

If you like mint tea, or sweet tea… give this bottled beverage a try!