As black-tea blends go, this is a bit above-average in my experience, and worth purchasing at a discount if you seek a coffee alternative with a caffeine kick. Mine was supplied at a hotel, and I took a couple extra bags home to try in my own well water for fair-comparison's sake.

Bigelow delivers extra caffeine through the added ingredient, "black tea extract". In essence, they take concentrated tea and add it back to black tea to dose up the caffeine, and presumably, taste too. This is a simple yet clever approach, and it works, but not as well as I thought it would. The flavor is just a hint stronger than most of their black blends, but not so much so that it slaps you in the face and proclaims that message with startling unambiguity. Yet it still is good, with a noticeable bitterness that stops just short of being unpleasant. It does remind me a lot of my wife's Connemara Kitchen Irish Breakfast tea in overall flavor, though not quite as rich and full-bodied.

I can't tell you if this is the black-tea counterpart of Mountain Dew on the caffeine front. Since I'm largely caffeine-immune after three decades of drinking a liter or two of Diet Dr Pepper a day, you'll have to rely on someone else for a fair evaluation of the energy-boosting effect. The stated dose on their website is 60-90 mg per cup.

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