Come on, Trader Joe's! What's the deal here? It's fantastically difficult to mess up peppermint and you came closer to doing so than any I've tried yet. The very low price (beaten in my experience only by Wal-Mart's store brand and Carrington, both noticeably higher-quality) is the only thing that saves this rating from sinking like a drowning tea bag below the beverage version of the Mendoza line.

Best I can say: this is tolerable, not unpleasant, but weak and underwhelming in almost every manner, from aroma to flavor to packaging. I gave this higher than 50% rating only because I like peppermint as an herb, with ravenous fervor, and it doesn't taste like something else ugly. However, it doesn't have very much flavor, nor dry-bag aroma. Wet-bag is the closet scent to what I'd expect; are the flavors somehow staying locked in the leaves that are there, despite being finely chopped? The steeping took longer to darken and lifted fewer essential-oil droplets than any other peppermint I've tried, then I looked closely and saw two reasons why:
1) The wet bag (not dry bag, mind you) was still less than half full of material, and
2) A substantial minority of that (maybe 20-25%) was noticeable stems.
The processing is cheap, cheap, cheap!

Then I noticed flakes floating up—the bag ruptured. Another one had a small hole and leaked a few leaf and stem flakes out too. The packaging is cheap, cheap, cheap! I'm starting to sound like Tweety-Bird.

OK, so one needs two bags of this feeble version to get one decent cup, and you risk the bag's having a "wardrobe malfunction". I'll probably use the rest of the box to flavor other teas and just count the floating leaves as extra dietary fiber. Thereafter, no mas, until TJ's does demonstrably better with every aspect of this in the future. Sad, too, as they do have some great teas otherwise!

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