I found this tea at the Dollar Tree, so I decided to try it. Inside the box are 12 large, round, unwrapped tea bags. The total weight of the tea is 84g, so each bag contains 7g, or enough for 2-3 cups of tea. Though the tea is intended to be made into iced tea, I'm drinking it hot.

I cut open one of the bags to look at the dry tea. It looks like a mixture of ground up CTC pellets and leaves. The pieces of leaf and stem are lighter in color than the pellets, so there's an interesting contrast. The dry tea smells of oak leaves, but is quite faint.

Adding the hot water opens up the aroma quite a bit. The tea smells earthy and slightly malty, very much like Chinese teas. The aroma isn't as strong as I'd like, but it's nice. In fact, the tea smells very similar to Foojoy's black tea in teabags.

The initial flavor surprised me. The earthiness is quite pronounced, but instead of being malty, the tea has a sort of woody sweetness like willow bark. The tea is a little astringent, but not bitter at all. As the tea cools and the flavors develop, the woody flavor intensifies to be reminiscent of fresh pine sawdust. The finish is slightly malty, but short and fleeting. The tea has an interesting flavor profile. It tastes mostly like a Chinese tea, but there's a bit of a background maltiness that isn't quite like an Assam, but doesn't really taste Chinese to me, either. Maybe a Chinese/Sri Lankan blend? Unfortunately, the package says nothing about the blend's origins. By the end of the cup, there's a slight bitterness on the tongue, but it's still really mellow and mild. The flavor ends up a little thin for my taste, but I still like this tea a lot.

Even at grocery store prices ($3.00 for 6 ounces) this tea is really inexpensive. I normally ignore iced tea blends, but this one really surprised me. The only problem for me is that the teabags are too large for a single cup of tea.

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