Aviva Spearmint Yerba Mate Tea Review, Cedar Tea and Total Health Expo

Today kicks off Aviva‘s yerba mate week.  I’ll be reviewing the Premium Wild Harvest Yerba Mate to start.  This tea comes in a teabag for easy brewing.  It contains wild harvest grown yerba mate and spearmint leaf.  Their instructions for serving are:

Place one bag in a eight ounce cup. Add fresh water just off the stove and serve.

Like Wrigley's Doublemint Gum

You can steep for as long as you like depending on how strong you like the flavour, the mate won’t get bitter.  Okay let’s brew.  The smell has very much a traditional clean yerba mate smell.  The brew and the dried teabag don’t smell too minty even after I squeezed the teabag to try to release the aroma from the oils.  The color of the brew was a dark brown with an undertone of brilliant moss green.  Mm..  The yerba mate blended with the spearmint to create a very interesting taste.  The tea is only slightly minty, but the spearmint altered the taste of the yerba mate enough so that the entire beverage is different.  The yerba mate surprisingly didn’t dominate the tea. The two balance each other quite well.  The tea reminded me of Wigley’s Doublemint Chewing Gum!  It was quite refreshing with a clean finish.  I think this would be great to have as an iced tea in the summer with some fresh spearmint if you like minty teas.

Today, I also had a chance to try cedar tea, a traditional Algonquin beverage, at the Sugarbush Maple Syrup festival at Kortright and Bruce’s Mill.  It’s high in Vitamin C and super tasty!  Apparently people used to drink this to prevent/cure scurvy.  All they did was boil hot water with some cedar branches for a few hours and let it sit.  Sorry I didn’t bring my camera or I would have taken pictures of the tea!  They let the tea steep for a long time, so it was a reddish brown color much like a rooibos tea.  I found instructions here, but I wouldn’t recommend adding the white sugar – you can sweeten naturally with maple syrup or agave. Oh yes and if you are a Maple Syrup junkie like me, the festival is definitely worth checking out. It runs until April 18th so hurry up. The pancakes were soooooo good. If only they had pancake with dripping hot butter and maple syrup tea.

Next weekend is the Total Health Show.  I will be covering the on the 17th and blogging about it right after the show.  If you are in Toronto or the GTA I highly encourage you to check out the event.  Robert Bateman, Brian Clement (the founder of the Hippocrates Health Institute), Dr. Aris Latham and a host of other speakers will be there.  The exhibitors list is equally impressive.  My friend Chef Franceso will also be there promoting his raw food catering company.  I’m super excited!

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