RateTea has been good for my life, by motivating me to variegate my tea sampling, and opening up new flavor and olfactory worlds. How's that for advertorial testimony? :-) That, however, has included getting me to sample nasty to mediocre teas, as well as some very good ones I otherwise wouldn't have had. This classifies mostly as "mediocre".

Another motel tea I grabbed to taste for rating's sake, this spearmint-blended black tea left me in a dilemma. Tolerant of spearmint, but far preferring peppermint, I knew personal taste would drag this rating down some. Of course it did. But *for* a spearmint tea, how is it? In short: not bad, not great! Spearmint, which isn't a particularly intense herb to begin with (at least vs. peppermint) thoroughly dominated the dry-bag and in-cup aroma, to the extent I couldn't detect the black tea. I barely could taste the black tea, and only with some conscious effort. Only in the wet-bag smell did the black tea become apparent, with spearmint still there. For this blend, Bigelow uses a good-quality spearmint—smooth and naturally sweet—but apparently a very weak black tea that limply whimpers in the background. It's basically a naturally caffeinated spearmint tea, and not bad at all for spearmint, if you're curious to try.

A side note: Bigelow has changed the first part of the tea name from "Plantation" to "Perfectly".

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