Balance, Berries and Bakery Vibes: Our Fall Equinox Tea Guide
Welcome, autumn!
We’ve been playing footsie with the season for weeks, as many of us went back to school, as Labor Day Weekend arrived, as the days grew shorter. But all along, we’ve dwelled in summer.
On Tuesday, however, we officially bid goodbye to the flip-flops season, and embrace a trio of sweater-swaddled months. Because September 22 this year marks the fall equinox, the autumn day when light and darkness are evenly divided across the day’s 24 hours. From the 22nd until the winter solstice on December 21, the shortest day of the year, the balance between light and darkness in the Northern Hemisphere will contain increasingly more night.
We savor these celestial milestones. They remind us of the universe’s vastness, and of our minuscule position within it. And of course they also invite us to think about tea. The fall equinox delivers us straight to dreams of hot morning mugs while still wrapped in our thick cold-weather robes. Of afternoon tea breaks on a back deck, strewn with fallen leaves. Of sleep-nurturing herbal teas, warming us and lulling us into slumber after the kids are down for bed.
Fall equinox marks Mid-Autumn Festival in China
In China, the fall equinox always falls somewhere in the same general time period as the Mid-Autumn Festival, a vibrant three-day public holiday. This year, it begins on Friday, September 25, and comes just two days after the annual Chinese Farmers’ Harvest Festival.
If you’ve ever encountered Chinese mooncakes, they’re tied to this holiday. Eating mooncakes during the holiday symbolizes completeness and family unity. During the festival, families gather for feasts, light lanterns and make sure to honor the Harvest Moon—September’s full moon.
Whether you devour mooncakes or not (you can bet we’ll be inhaling them!), let’s consider sipping teas this week and across autumn that somehow distill autumn’s majesties into individual sips. And let’s also use tea to help bring us into the present—while we prepare it, brew it, pour it and finally bring it to our lips and invite the liquor to fill us with gratefulness.
Teas for Fall Equinox: Balance Tea Herbal Blend
The equinoxes refer explicitly to balance—when they land, light and darkness take up equal measures of a 24-hour day. So let’s honor this natural and global phenomenon with a tea that also appreciates yin and yang. Our Balance Tea combines cinnamon, cardamom, licorice root, coriander, fennel, ginger root and rose in alignment with Ayurvedic principles that champion harmony and yes, balance, in both mind and body. The tea broadcasts magnificent perfume, and does not contain caffeine. It’s a beautiful, fall-resonant tea for sipping from morning until just before bed.
Teas for Fall Equinox: Rhapsody of Berries Fruit Tea (Organic)
With colder weather comes more than pumpkin-spice vibes—the seasonal shift also carries with it nasties like the flu and incorrigible colds. Now is the time to tip the balance away from the season’s dark side, by drinking our Rhapsody of Berries fruit tea. This delicious and health-boosting tea revolves around elderberries, which cultures around the world have tapped for centuries for immunity support. The famous superfood aids body detoxification, and bolsters the body’s ability to ward off the sniffles, body aches and other misfortunes that sneakily trail fall’s annual arrival.
Teas for Fall Equinox: FoCo Cocoa Black Tea
Fires may not—yet—crackle in hearths. But with shorter days, cooling temperatures and leaves beginning to engage with their annual color switcheroo, chimney smoke is on its way. And we’ve got the perfect tea for getting in the mood. Our FoCo Cocoa, formulated by our outstanding Fort Collins team, showcases serious hot chocolate qualities, while remaining firmly in the tea camp. The bespoke blend combines black tea, yerba mate, chocolate, cocoa, vanilla, cinnamon and black pepper for an autumn-meets-winter extravaganza. We love sipping this one as soon as temperatures begin descending and frost stiffens grasses. Brew it, inhale deeply, close your eyes—just like that, you’re at one with a roaring fireplace blaze on a crisp fall late afternoon.
Teas for Fall Equinox: Monkey Bread
Autumn immerses many of us in a baking state of mind. We dream of scones and slabs of coffee cake shellacked with butter. Apple pie reenters the dessert conversation. And we crave traditional symbols of pastry decadence like monkey bread, that pull-apart cinnamon delicacy beguiling bakery customers from Maine to Montana. We find monkey bread so enchanting that we crafted a blend that captures monkey bread’s high points, in liquid form.
This ambrosial brew contains three traditional forms of Camellia sinensis—green pu-erh, oolong and black tea. The terrific trio lends this tea serious heft, complete with malty and even floral notes. Then comes the monkey bread backbone: cinnamon and allspice. Prepare this pastry doppelgänger in a pot, add a little honey and cream to a mug, fill it with the brewed Monkey Bread and let down your guard. This beauty will carry you away to a bakery on a festive October Saturday morning somewhere fetching.
