The Tea Spot has just released a brand new blend just for you. As a “lavender lady” myself, I have fallen completely head over heels for this month’s Tea SpotLight- our Lady Lavender.

Lady Lavender has one foot firmly planted in the Earl Grey blend we have come to know and love, and the other in something completely new. We’ve taken a classic Earl Grey black tea with bergamot base and embellished with lavender, vanilla, orange peel, and other citruses. This unique twist is soothing and uplifting all at once, is lovely hot and exceedingly refreshing iced!

The health benefits of black tea are numerous and include- anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-oxidant, and anti-aging properties. As always, our loose leaf tea is completely calorie-free, fat free, and gluten free so you can indulge without a care. And to sweeten the deal, lavender flower tea infusions are well known for relieving headaches and stress.

For best steeping practice infuse one teaspoon of leaves per eight ounces of boiling water for 3-5 minutes. Happy Sipping!

Lady Lavender Steeping

Lady Lavender combines the unique, flavorful citrus, bergamot & vanilla notes of our Earl of Grey with the uplifting, floral scent and taste of lavender. It’s a dream in a cup, a perfect new rendition for the black tea fan in summer. Take a look at the full British Tea Collection for more information!

Assam black tea - photo credit: The Tea Spot

So the saying goes, about “the strong one” – Assam tea is the one many of us wake up to. This brisk black tea is blended into English and Irish breakfast teas, and more than 400 different single estate Assams are available from this most prolific of all tea regions in the world.

Assam valley - photo credit: doniv

Everything about this tea is big – even the leaf. The larger leaves produce a darker and stronger tea, which makes it stand up well to milk and sugar. Local people love to drink spicy masala chai (brewed sweet tea with milk and spices) using Assam loose tea leaves. Amongst black teas, you can always pick out Assam by its distinctive malty aroma and honey finish to the taste. Even though it’s a very strong tea, Assam is velvety smooth.

The varietal of tea plant that comes from Assam is Camellia sinensis assamica, and its leaves are about twice as big as the Chinese varietal Camellia sinensis sinensis. Assam is one of only two regions in the world with native tea plants (along with Southern China). This very wet Himalayan valley extends over 500 miles along the Brahmaputra river. It gets 80 – 120 inches of rainfall annually, and parts of it look like a tropical jungle. Assam is home to the largest wildlife sanctuary in India, where you can still see the one-horned Indian Rhinoceros and the Asiatic Elephant.

One-horned Rhino - photo credit: Lip Kee

Assam tea steeps up into a beautiful dark liquor. Adding milk to the tea turns it to a characteristically ruby-amber hue.

The way to make a traditional English cuppa would be to put one teaspoon of loose leaf tea per cup into a warmed teapot. Fill the teapot with freshly boiled water and stir a few seconds with a tall spoon to “elevate” the tea. Let the tea steep for 3-5 minutes. The tea will get stronger and more bitter the longer it steeps. Many Britons add milk to their tea, a habit which began when tea was thought to be bad for your health. Milk was added, in an attempt to make it healthier. “Builders’ Tea” was inspired by British builders who would not work on a house without tea breaks as a way of structuring a hard day’s work. They prefer strong, smooth and mellow tea, like Assam, and drink it with milk and sugar. Builder’s Tea goes especially well with digestive biscuits, making for a hearty snack.

We try to put our money where our mouth is as much as possible. As a company, we get Eco-Passes to encourage riding public transportation, we compost all of our tea leaves (a ridiculously HUGE amount of tea leaves, you can imagine) in the company kitchen, and we recycle in the warehouse like nobody’s business.

To celebrate this year, we’re promoting the ease of Green Tea drinking by giving away a Green Tea Sampler & a Steeping Mug to one of our Facebook Fans. We’re opening up the contest to all fans, new & old. One winner will be chosen at the end of the month. And I have to say that we’ve got the coolest community growing on Facebook with lots of participation from tea lovers all over the world. We even had to bust out our spanish translator recently to respond to a fan. ¡Que chido! You can join our community and can sign up for the contest here. Good luck!

Pretty pile of our Jasmine Pearls

This pearl form is a truly unique twist on loose leaf tea. Tightly rolled, when steeped in water, these pearls slowly unfurl and can actually get better and better with each additional infusion.

Our Jasmine Pearls start out in pearl form (left), and after the first infusion the two leaves and leaf bud that compose the pearl can be clearly seen (right).

Pearls Before and After First Infusion

While preparing this spotlight, I was able to take one teaspoon of Jasmine Pearls and make four 8 ounce cups of tea in one day! With this tea, you really can get “bang for your buck” with the potential for so many delicious re-infusions! Just remember when re-steeping tea in this way, you want to add about 30 seconds of steeping time with each additional infusion.

The brew and leaves after one infusion

Best steeping practices- use one teaspoon per 8 ounces of water, steep 2-3 minutes with water that is 175° F (bring water to a boil and let cool three minutes).

Enjoy!

Jasmine Pearls is featured here with our Steeping Cup!

Well, it’s that time of the year again. It always comes so soon. The weather is beautiful, sunny, things are starting to turn green, and this weekend marks the year’s first Farmer’s Market here in Boulder.

There’s a lot to look forward to: we’ve got a new and exciting tea list, some great new signage premiering our new look (not pictured here), and I can’t wait to see a few familiar faces out there. Oh, and the food. How could I forget the amazing food? It might still be early for some of my favorite veggies, but it should be a gorgeous day to grab a taster of tea by the creek. While you’ll have to come on down to see everything we offer, I can say with confidence that I’ll be serving out some Climber’s High, Chocolate Peppermint Patty, and Iced Blue Mountain Nilgiri (if it’s warm enough!). There will be other samples as well, so if you’re a Boulder local, come on down and check it out.

As always, our website offers a Farmer’s Market Pickup option so that you can pick up orders from us directly at Saturday Farmer’s Market and save on shipping.

The most nuanced differences in our loose tea collection is found in our straight black teas, in my opinion. While darjeeling has very distinct muscatel notes and lapsang souchong is heavy on the smoky notes, I have to admit that I get a little fuzzy in being able to describe, in words, the distinct characteristics of our other blacks, even after working here nearly 5 years. (I’m not proud to admit this!)

So… for fun, and to once-and-for-all learn the nuanced differences of our traditional black teas we set up a blind tasting in the office today. That’s when one person steeps up a set of teas of undisclosed types and presents them to the rest of the group to sample, essentially “blind”. I even went so far as to hide the wet leaves, which can give huge clues to what’s steeped up based on the size, shape, & color of the leaf. We then began to sample the unknown teas, aka teas #1-5, which included: Assam (India), Nilgiri (India), Keemun (China), Yunnan (China), & Ceylon (Sri Lanka) – in no particular order ;)

Before we attempted to assign names to the brews, we gathered adjectives for each cup from our little tea tasting team and ranked everyone’s favs. Then everyone guessed which tea was in each cup, as I practiced my best poker face. After revealing who got them right, Maria our CEO was the clear winner – no shocker there, she knows her teas!

To extend this guessing game to our readers. Browse our descriptions of each tea below (listed from top to bottom in the photo above) then guess which of our straight black teas is described – a kind of  virtual blind-tasting. If you have some of these black teas to cup along side, add your own adjectives and rankings in the comments section. (Scroll to the bottom of the post to see our answers).

So when I came home, I thought I’d try the closest tea I thought we had to a Lipton tea bag here at The Tea Spot: Blue Mountain Nilgiri. Our bread and butter plain organic black tea. It was heavenly… and I kept on drinking it – hot, chilled, you name it. BMN, as we call it, tastes like it’s from another planet – but why? The difference is in the leaf. Leaf vs.dust. I wouldn’t be so surprised if I were to compare lettuce dust to the leaf, spinach dust vs a leaf, or basil dust vs. basil leaf… and tea’s no different :)

Chilling Blue Mountain Nilgiri

As The Tea Spots Customer Service Rep, I’m often asked what my favorite tea is. (As a side note: it is impossible to answer that question with just one tea. It’s like asking me to pick just one favorite flavor of ice cream, or one favorite pair of shoes. The joy is in the variety!) But, I do have flavored and unflavored favorites in each tea category, and am always more than happy to ‘break it down’ for anyone interested.

To start things off I’m going to delve right into my personal favorite flavored herbal tea: our Blood Orange Smoothie.

In my house, it has been affectionately dubbed “The Boss”, quite simply, because we think it’s the best. Blood Orange Smoothie is a caffeine-free red rooibos based tea from South Africa. We’ve loaded it up with all the goods- orange peel, apples, hibiscus, rosehips, safflowers, rose petals, and vanilla and citrus flavors. These ingredients combine to make a naturally sweet, refreshing cuppa that reminds many happy sippers of an orange creamsicle. “The Boss” is delicious hot, and is also incredibly refreshing when served over ice.

To make Blood Orange Smoothie, add 1 teaspoon of tea per 8 ounces of water, and steep for at least six minutes with boiling water. You cannot over-steep this delicious tea, the more steep time the better!

The health benefits associated with red Rooibos tea are numerous. Rooibos contains copper, iron, potassium, calcium, fluoride, zinc, manganese, alpha-hydroxy (for healthy skin) and magnesium (for the nervous system). It is naturally caffeine free, and as such, is perfect before bed and is a very popular choice among kids. According to studies conducted in South Africa and Japan, Rooibos has been shown to aid in health problems such as insomnia, irritability, headaches, nervous tension, and hypertension. In South Africa, Rooibos has been used to treat allergies such as hay fever, asthma and eczema very effectively. Rooibos contains antioxidants which can help slow the aging process and boost the immune system.*

I hope you’re ready to try Blood Orange Smoothie now! You can find it on our site here, in a sample size, ¼ pound, and 1 pound bags. Now if you’ll excuse me, all this talk about “The Boss” has made me thirsty…

Cheers!

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

If you’re familiar with us here at The Tea Spot, you know that we often characterize our tea blends as “handcrafted.” Today, I’d like to show you exactly what that means and how our blends come to be.  

Our teas come from all corners of the world–traditional regions like India, China, Sri Lanka and Japan–into our warehouse where we turn them into our own creations. Our herbal and botanical blending elements come from a whole host of other places: Washington mint, South African rooibos, Moroccan rosebuds, to name a few. These ingredients are hand grown and picked at the source, but when they arrive here at our warehouse on the eastern slope of the Rockies, we try to turn them into something more. Our blends are our babies, carefully formed through rigorous (and largely enjoyable) taste testing sessions where we sometimes butt heads, but often agree exactly when we’ve produced the best cup.

When we’ve agreed on a recipe, we bump up the scale. This is when I roll up my sleeves and get to work. Typically, I’m blending a batch for packaging and sale that comes to about 30 lbs. It’s a simple but careful process of combining just the right amount of leaves, in the right order, so that the blend comes out even and smooth. Donning my hairnet, gloves, and trusty large scoop, I dole out the leaves and ingredients into a weighed container, pound by pound. Then comes the fun part: the physical blending. I use something I call the ‘badger method,’ but that’s far too embarrassing to comment on at length. Suffice to say it’s my way of making sure every cup has the perfect ratio of flavors, so that you can come to expect consistency from your favorite teas. Today we’re producing our Organic Jasmine Petals tea, a blend of a lovely Chinese Green and whole Jasmine Flowers (from Oregon). A simple but elegant blend. You’ve seen the before, so here’s the after:

Have questions about how we do things here at The Tea Spot? Post a comment below, or come say hello on our Twitter or Facebook!