A co-worker who drinks a lot of medicinal herbal teas left me this and regurgitated not the tea itself, but the claim that it "helps reduce free radicals". My response: "How? By imprisoning the radicals?" Smart-aleck retorts aside, I'm wary of teas that make a bunch of health claims that aren't solidly backed medically. So I won't evaluate those, especially not knowing how many radicals I have released vs. incarcerated in my physiological justice system. :-)

As with many Yogi offerings, this has a bunch of ingredients—10 to be specific, led by green tea, and including four (alfalfa, grapeseed extract, emblic fruit/amla extract, and Irish moss) I've not had in tea before. My aunt was big into distributing Shaklee nutritional supplements when I was a kid, and used to supply my parents with surplus alfalfa tablets she couldn't sell, so I know how that stuff tastes alone (like lawn clippings). I've used grapeseed oil, so that's no bother. The embic fruit appears in scientifically dubious Ayurvedic medicine, but doesn't seem harmful in and of itself, from what I've read. A bunch of different plants are called Irish moss (seaweed, perennial terrestrial ground covers, and more), so I don't know what the heck that is. I've had tea made almost wholly from Icelandic moss (a lichen), but I don't think this is that. Oh well...down the hatch!

The dry bag and in-cup smells are very weak, mostly reminiscent of green tea with earthy, straw-like tone, neither particularly pleasant nor offputting. The flavor basically is a taste-bud rendering of same—stronger, but only in a relative way (say, 4 on a 1–10 scale of power vs. 2 at best for the aroma). Aftertaste was stronger still (say, 5 on the same scale, but still far from blow-your-face-off potency). As for flavor quality, my best word to describe it is: weird. It's a haystraw/green-tea mix, with an occasional whiff of a somewhat astringent floral like marigold. The wet-bag smell brings out the floral element more, and despite being the least important or useful stage, actually is the most pleasant part of the sensory experience overall. In summary, I only would buy this stuff if I believed its putative health claims. I don't, so that's that, for this, for me!

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