Investigating the dry bag (looks and aroma), then the wet bag in-cup, I expected the ginger to have a lot more kick. Not that I thought it would treat the epiglottis as a punching bag, like Vernors soda, or the strong "Ginger Beer" I often drank in college...but this presentation did set expectations that reality couldn't meet.

Quite a lot of yellowish ginger pieces floated above the green-tea leaves in the wet bag, along with a few stems of lemongrass. Essential oils (presumably mostly from the ginger, since the lemongrass was sparse, small and very dry) floated up into an obvious sheen of droplets. The color brewed up rather dark and opaque for a herbally flavored green tea. Promises, promises...and then:

The ginger is not as strong as I thought it would be, except in the aftertaste. That at least permits one to taste the green tea, which I did not expect to be able to do, given ginger's tendency to overwhelm other ingredients. Is that a good thing? Yes if you prefer balance in ginger/tea flavor (ratchet the rating up), no if you like brute force (ratchet the rating down). Since the exercise of rating tastes is intrinsically subjective, I did the latter. The lemongrass seems like a superfluous ingredient; I had no sense of it at all except visually. This isn't a bad tea, but it could use a rebalancing if Tazo expects to impress the ginger crowd with this offering.

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