Wednesday, June 10, 2009

What, mint?

Alright, here comes the Mint post :)

I'm going to cover 3 mint teas/tisane's that I enjoy.

1) White Peony Mint Tea
2) Morrocan Mint Tea
3) Peppermint tisane

1) I bought this tea from "The Salon" on St-Denis near Mont-Royal metro. It's an excellent place because they let you taste the tea before you buy it.
Often, mint tea is usually green tea mixed with mint, so this is definitely a different taste. If you're familiar with white tea in general, the taste is milder. So, this tea has the mildness of white tea with mint, which produces an subtle and clean taste in your mouth, as opposed to just being attacked with a mint bomb. It also smells quite nice.
It's definitely good for when you don't want intense mint.

So I give it

out of 5

Here's the address of The Salon: 4586 St.-Denis

2) Moroccan Mint Tea

Like I mentioned before, as far as I know, this tea is green tea mixed with mint. However, methods of preparation do differ.
You can purchase this tea from many places. Many companies have it in tea bag form, such as Mighty Leaf (they are expensive, but it's because of the packaging, they use real tea leaves in the nylon bags and there's honestly quite a bit of tea in each bag). You can also buy it from La Vielle Europe on St Laurent near des Pins under the name "Folie Marocaine" for about 2.50$ for 50 g - which I have. Folie Marocaine is incredibly intense. I made the mistake of putting too many tea leaves in my cup the first time and was attacked with mint from all angles, which made it a little hard to drink towards the end. So make sure you just put a bit, because a little goes a long way.

However, my favorite preparation by far is I guess what you would call the "traditional" way in the awesome metal tea pot with the glass cups. They typically put sugar in it, though I think it is optional.




The tea is quite strong and has a bit of a bitter after taste, especially without sugar. I've had this method of preparation at many places, including teh Faubourg (there is a moroccan resto in there), Cafe Gitana, one of the shisha places on Guy near Ste Catherine...basically restaurants and shisha places have it. So it's not hard to find :)

I give it


out of 5 too

3) Peppermint Tisane

I consider this tisane to be part of my stomach problem power pack.

Aside - in case you wanna know: Stomach problem power pack = 3 tisanes I consider to help stomach problems and I carry them around with me.

Mint = digestion
Ginger = queasiness
Fennel = gas/cramps

Now you know, you can try them out if you ever have those problems :P

Back to the tisane. You can get it at an grocery store. I don't stick to one particular brand, because truth be told, most of them taste similar and produce the same outcome for me :) While the other two mint teas do help with digestion too, if I intend to sleep or don't feel like having anything with caffeine or don't want the tea taste, I'll have this. It's a nice and smooth taste and not really intense at all.

So, this is predictable, but I give this



out of 5 if only because it helps with digestion.

That ends mint, at least for now (unless I find more mint later).

On side note, there are some places I'd like to try sometime:
Cha Noir
Espirt The
Cafe Dervish

3 comments:

p.w. said...

ah, so 5 teacups for all the mint teas in this review! i've only tried moroccan mint tea, which i love.

hm, i didn't know about the effects of those 3 tisanes; i may prepare my own stomach problem power pack from now on...

njosnavelin said...

haha, yeah...I do like Mint it seems :)
I can prepare some of the White Peony Mint on Saturday, then you can try.

Yeah. Fennel I actually saw on the net helps with that. The others I determined by trial/error.

And then there's Pu-erh (though it's a tea) - it's spose to help regulate your digestive system, or at least that's what I've read on the net (+ what the cha guan people say). :D

collagen said...

I love mint tea. The mint tea is manufactured from the freshly chosen green tea leaves. It is appreciated worldwide owing to the following features:
No side effects
Rich Aroma and taste of tea
Free from artificial ingredients. It is the best tea in cough and cold. Also it is the best tea in winter.