When summer comes to an end and fall starts to come around, many things happen to our world. The leaves change color, the nights become longer, and you wake up one morning feeling worse than dirt because you have a cold. How do I deal with that? I buy myself a big box of mint-tea bags, grab myself a giant tub of honey, and a bottle of cold medicine to force myself to get better. Mint tea is one the first teas I started drinking when I fell in love with the drink. It is very crisp and leaves a cooling feeling in your mouth and throat. This not only soothes your throat, but the heat from the hot tea does as well. Also, it is a tea that is best served plain, or with a little bit of honey if you are feeling under the weather. Normally cream and sugar fights with the flavor of the tea and make it less enjoyable for me, but everyone has their own opinion on how to make it.

The tea I tested this week was Bigelow’s mint tea called Mint Medley. They are the same tea company that the school gets their tea from for the dorms, and I would highly recommend ordering some of this amazing tea. It has both spearmint and peppermint leaves in the blend, so it is extra minty. The café-o-meter, which Bigelow uses to measure the amount of caffeine in all of their teas, says that it has zero milligrams of caffeine per cup. This is good because it makes it a good after-dinner tea as it will not keep you up all night and it is very relaxing. The box also gives instructions on how to make both hot and iced tea. To make a cup of hot tea, it says to start with a pot of fresh cold water and bring it to a roaring boil. Once the water is boiling, pour the water into a cup and let it steep for four minutes and do not squeeze the bag when you remove it. When I made my cup of tea, I steeped it for longer than four minutes, but I personally like a stronger tea. To make iced tea, do the same thing you did to make hot tea but let the bag steep for longer and then pour it over ice.

For a box of 20 tea bags, the three dollars I paid was not a bad price at all. Not only that, they made sure to mention on the back of the box that every tea bag was sealed in an aluminum foil pouch to protect it from the outside world and to make sure it is fresh. This is also nice because it means that it is easy to take on the go so if you wanted to make a cup of tea at work, you could easily bring it with you.