Look Ahead to 2025 With Some of Ku Cha’s 2024 Faves!
Happy New Year, Ku Cha House of Tea family!
We hope your holiday season has been grand, with loads of cheer, love and gratitude. And we wish much more of the same across 2025 for every one of you.
While the year ahead will bring with it much change, some things of course remain constant. That includes, in part, teas that Ku Cha House of Tea staff loved during 2024. Their adoration for specific teas isn’t going to drift away just because of the calendar change—could be they thrill to them even more by this time next year.
At the same time, they’re sure to find and embrace new teas in the coming year. After all, our inventory of whole-leaf tea is expansive, with more than 200 teas in stock. In addition, we routinely introduce new single-origin teas and blends—including many blends that we craft ourselves. Over the years, we’ve noticed that employees often fall hard for the newbies resting on our shelves.
So let’s look back at some of our 2024 house favorites—and by extension peer into 2025. These teas will remain favorites!
Tea Favorites: Gyokuro
Our staff enjoys exceptional taste. So it’s no surprise gyokuro, regarded as the highest grade of Japanese green tea, ranks as a favorite. The glorious tea, which means “jade dew” in Japanese and is only harvested in early spring, spends 20 days in shade before farmers pick it carefully by hand. Immediately after harvest, the farmers steam, dry and meticulously roll the leaves into pine needle-like shapes. This is a tea to embrace for 2025!
Tea Favorites: Da Hong Pao
The vast universe of oolong teas attracts tea connoisseurs and lovers from across the globe. Oolongs can broadcast nuts, honey, fruit tree flowers, caramel—the list goes on. And among oolongs, those known as “rock oolongs” stand as the most prized. These exquisite teas hail from the Wu Yi Mountains in Fujian Province in southern China. Da Hong Pao, or “Big Red Robe” in Chinese, receives widespread praise for its strong fragrance, rich and roasted taste and its pleasant, lingering sweetness.
Tea Favorites: Cape Town Medley
Sip a cup of our Cape Town Medley and you can almost feel the monsoon wind blowing over the Cape of Good Hope! That’s because it rests on a foundation of rooibos, the tea made from South Africa’s rooibos shrub. People across the country drink rooibos the way those in other countries guzzle tea and coffee. Fortunately, rooibos long ago migrated far from its ancestral home. Now people everywhere drink rooibos. This blend gets deep and rich assists from the addition of pomegranate, pomelo, orange, carrot and safflower. A taste sensation! It’s also good for you—rooibos contains a wallop of antioxidants and electrolytes, solid for everything from relieving thirst to fighting free radicals that damage the body’s cells. Enjoy!
Tea Favorites: Firefly Chai
We craft quite a number of chais at Ku Cha. The selection normally includes about a dozen these teas made famous in India before they spread around the world. All of our blends differ from one another—some lean more heavily into spicy heat like cayenne; others focus exclusively on baking spices, or sweetness. Our Firefly Chai, with its jolt of cardamom and vanilla, comes across as especially smooth and sweet. The ingredients complement the black tea with perfection. The rest of the ingredients—ginger root, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg—also perform ballet with cardamom and vanilla. It’s a true charmer! No surprise our staff lists it as a favorite.
Tea Favorites: Peach Oolong
Take a wonderful green oolong, ripe with grassy, herbal and honeyed notes and pair it with peach—one of the finest, most complex fruits on Earth. It’s not shocking that the combination yields loads of fan favoritism—it’s spectacular. The blend also contains mango, plum blossom, calendula and sunflower. Some teas are just meant for morning, others for after dinner. This one is an all-day sipper. The only reason to shrink from it beginning in the late afternoon is the caffeine; if it keeps you awake at night, best to switch to something herbal.
Tea Favorites: Mountain Mist
When you order a cup green tea at a restaurant, or of course snag a can of iced tea from a vending machine, the tea’s provenance does not emerge. That’s because it likely is a mix of cheap tea from different countries. Also—it’s not good tea; there’s no reason to crow about it. But that’s not how we roll at Ku Cha! Our Mountain Mist is an ancient tea from Northern Sichuan Province. Grown on Mountain Meng, it’s been lionized for centuries. The tea saint Lu Yu, in his 10th century book “Cha Jing,” identified it as the best tea in the world. People have been brewing and savoring this tea from at least the Tang Dynasty. Now it’s your turn! The tea brews misty, sweet and fragrant, reminiscent of morning dew dropping from pine trees atop Mountain Meng.
Tea Favorites: Darjeeling 1st Flush
Workers in India’s high altitude region of Darjeeling pick this special tea by hand during the first flush season—late February to early April. The silver buds on these tea shrubs, well rolled and elongated, brew into a full-bodied, honey-toned elixir with notes of muscatel grape. It’s fruity, complex and wonderful. Sip it every morning—now that’s a way to begin a day!
Tea Favorites: Monkey Bread
Two renditions of Camellia sinensis—oolong and sweet rice puerh—serve as ballast for this playful and delicious tea. The puerh brings that fermented tea’s signature funkiness to the combination. At the same time, the blend leverages milk oolong for a creamy smoothness. Finally it includes cinnamon—the predominant flavor in the American bakery classic monkey bread—and allspice. Good for digestion and other health conditions, and wonderful for flavor, this has been a staff favorite ever since we came up with the blend.
