The Good: Nice aroma, Generally good taste (especially with sugar), Caffeinated and energizing!
The Bad: Very familiar taste, Ultimately a little more generic than flavorful.
The Basics: Celestial Seasonings makes a powerful, if fairly generic tea that is good and will wake up the drinker, but this will not entertain the taste buds.
When you drink a lot of teas, ones that are similar begin to taste a lot alike. I made this observation last year, when I cracked open my last new box (at the time) of tea from my trip to Celestial Seasonings, "Morning Thunder!" Morning Thunder promises to be an energizing tea and it is sold on the idea of being a forthright and powerful tea and on that front, it lives up.
However, my experiences with sampling Celestial Seasonings teas leaves me in a strange place. As I sat down on my second pot of "Morning Thunder," I came to the realization that this tea was awfully familiar. Indeed, this is the black tea equivalent of another adjective tea: Decaf China Pearl white tea. I was highly tempted to simply copy and paste the taste section of that tea for this review, but I opted for new material instead!
Basics
Morning Thunder is a 100% Natural Black Tea from Celestial Seasonings. This black tea is 100% natural and as such is fully caffeinated. This is a strong, heady tea and the box features a charging bison for a reason; this is a straightforward tea on a mission to wake the drinker up.
Morning Thunder comes in Celestial Seasonings's standard stringless tea bags, which are paired together with easy to separate perforations that allow one to separate the tea bags. When I make pots of tea, I tend to use two bags and leave them connected. A box of Morning Thunder comes with ten pairs (20 individual) of tea bags inside the standard wax paper bag that can be refolded to keep the tea fresh.
Ease Of Preparation
Morning Thunder is your standard black tea as far as the preparation goes. A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea and could be reused and make a second cup of this tea with about as much flavor that the first cup yielded. The second cup, naturally, does not come out as strong as the first, but provided the first steeping was not more than the recommended upper recommended steeping time of six minutes, a second use can come out with about 3/4 strength. I tend to make my tea using a 32 oz. steeping tea pot and that works well for both a first and second steeping.
To prepare Morning Thunder black tea, bring a pot of water to a boil and pour it over the tea bags. Experience has taught me this tea brews best and to its most flavorful when the water is at a rolling boil, not just barely there. This is a tea that wants to be truly cooked by the water! This tea takes four to six minutes to steep and when the water is seriously boiling, it comes out strong at the four minute point without needing any additional time. After six minutes, though, the flavor does not concentrate any more so there is no benefit to letting it steep longer than that.
Taste
Well, if Decaf China Pearl were a black tea instead of a white tea, it would be this. Morning Thunder is uninhibited by any standard for taste with a name that gives no hint at what is in it. If one imagines the tea they get at a decent Chinese restaurant and could imagine having that tea boiled down such that 3/4 of the water were boiled out, but the tea flavor concentrated down, that is what Morning Thunder tastes like.
Perhaps a better taste analogy is in coffee. If one used the coffee filters twice, this would produce a cup of coffee with the approximate flavor of Morning Thunder, though there is nothing acidic about this tea. Or perhaps the better description would be to compare it to the universally known Lipton tea (which, admittedly, I am not a fan of). Morning Thunder tastes like a cup of Lipton tea brewed with three (or four) tea bags.
If you're gathering that I'm having a difficult time pinning the flavor of Morning Thunder down other than comparing it to a vastly stronger version of Decaf China Pearl, you're getting an accurate read on my review. This is, in its most pure sense, a tea flavored tea. Hot, it tastes good, but it's a simple, strong, black tea. There is no pretense at flavoring it to be anything other than a strong, black tea. And in that way, it certainly lives up.
That said, when the tea is hot, I add a teaspoon of sugar to it and it is sweet black tea. Morning Thunder is actually one of the few teas I can think of where the tea flavor overpowers even sugar. Easily. This does not get very sweet when one adds sugar. It becomes slightly sweeter, but the dominant taste is still forthright black tea. Adding milk does nothing for the flavor; the tea batters down any taste of cream and the result is pretty much identical to the addition of sugar, save that the temperature goes down. This is a tea that muscles all other flavors out of the way, but does not have anything to say other than "TEA" when it does.
Cold, the tea is just tea. It's not any more flavorful, does not possess an aftertaste, it's just strong, cold tea when iced or cold.
Nutrition
This tea is a very strong black tea comprised entirely of roasted mate and black tea. Think I was exaggerating about how difficult the flavor was to define? Consider the ingredients! As with most Celestial Seasonings teas, there is nothing unpronouncable in this tea (though I suppose there is someone who could stumble over mate) and it is 100% natural. It is gluten free, for those for whom that matters.
In terms of nutrition, Morning Thunder is not a recommended dietary supplement. In an 8 oz. mug, there are no calories, nor fat, nor sodium, nor carbs, nor protein. Any nutritional value would come from what you add to this. What the tea has is caffeine, though my box - direct from the Celestial Seasonings plant and to my knowledge identical to every other box in the marketplace - had no caffeine meter. It is effective at waking the consumer up, though!
Storage/Clean-up
Morning Thunder black tea is very easy to clean up after - the tea bags may be disposed in the garbage, or composted if you have a good garden and/or compost pile. The tea itself is a very dark tea and will stain most fabrics, so I tend to avoid drinking this one around anything that will easily stain. If one spills it on any albino mice that happen to be around, they are likely to be permanently stained.
Overall
Morning Thunder is a fairly average, if good, tea. It tastes fine, but there is nothing particularly flavorful about it to give a vivid recommendation. This might well be a good baseline tea; if one wants to know what tea tastes like, here it is! This is a nicely caffeinated blend which is good for those of us who work the night shift or who try writing about tea and other products the mornings after those long nights, but it's not a strong or distinct flavor.
If you can live with that and just want caffeine, Morning Thunder is for you!
For other Celestial Seasonings teas, please check out my reviews of:
Saphara Mango Ginger
Chamomile
Black Cherry Berry
6/10
For other beverage reviews, please visit my index page for an organized listing by clicking here!
© 2010, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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