Autumn is Ripe for Fruit-Spangled Teas
When our trails turn gold and crimson with fallen leaves; when the aroma of crackling firewood perfumes the neighborhood; and when we return to padding around the house in wool cardigans, we rejoice. Autumn, with all of its grand atmospherics, stokes the soul and melts the heart.
As the owners of tea shops and a busy online tea store, we also cherish the season for its exaltation of the pleasures of warm beverages. When we think of fall, we also dream about the way a warm mug of oolong warms our hands, and the way steam from a cup of hot sencha stimulates our senses.
One of fall’s signatures hinges on fruit. Apples and pears, for sure. Persimmons, absolutely. There’s also raspberries that turn juicy and ready for noshing during the special season—they’re known as “fall-bearing raspberries.”
The alignment of fruit and autumn touches on tea. Not only do we carry a huge range of teas that incorporate tea, we also have an entire section of the store and website devoted to “fruit teas.” We love all manner of fruit-spiked teas in fall; they never fail to somehow amplify the already good moods that spring from listening to gold aspen leaves “quaking” in stiff Colorado breezes, and then drifting down to the ground.
With the season upon us, now is the time to begin experimenting with fruit-speckled teas! You’ll quickly become a fruit tea convert, if not an evangelist.
Autumn Vibe Fruit Teas: Toasted Almond
Apple and almond—a classic combination. We find it in pies and tarts, in muffins and cupcakes, in quick breads, biscotti and coffee cakes. Flavor combinations like this persist, for generations. Why? Because they sing. And lovely harmonies decorate their songs. The apple-almond cantata charms us any time of the year. But we find its beguilements most potent during the season of dark mornings and pumpkins. Thus, we adore our Toasted Almond tea, and sip it like fiends across the fall. This beautiful tea contains real apple pieces, almonds, pieces of cinnamon and beetroot chunks for color. The addition of cinnamon makes it next-level fall—apple, almond and cinnamon, all in one tea? We still swoon, even though we’ve sipped it a thousand times.
Autumn Vibe Fruit Teas: Raspberry Black
The year’s first raspberries always arrive in summer, and we thrill to the arrival of these petite packages of flavor. There’s something profoundly transporting about that first bite of rasperry. The tidy fruit doesn’t yield an abundance of juice, but the little bits are plenty enough to fill the mouth with gorgeous flavor. But rasperries enjoy two seasons—other varieties get harvested in autumn. And these beauties, called “fall-bearing raspberries,” are just as extravagantly lovely as their summer siblings. For us, just as apples and pears conjure autumnal vibes, so do raspberries. Our Raspberry Black tea combines excellent black tea with blackberry leaves, rose and freeze-dried raspberries. Freeze-drying, in our opinion, is an especially excellent way to preserve the flavors of some fruits, like raspberries. Get your fall berry game into high gear with this outstanding tea!
Autumn Vibe Fruit Teas: Lemon Blossom Oolong
As we have already established in an earlier post, for tea fanatics like us October is Boolong! With its enormous diversity of flavors, many of them finding purchase in autumnal aromas like forest floor in fall, oolong serves as an ideal traditional tea for the spooky season. When ghosts shout boo! on Halloween, we grin. We just hear boolong! Our Lemon Blossom Oolong ups the autumn ante by incorporating apple into its ingredient lineup. It also includes lemon—which complements apple wonderfully—heather blossom and red cornflower blossom. The blossoms add complex floral aromas and flavors to the tea. Interested in further boosting the Halloween aspect of autumn? Then pick up a bag of our Lemon Blossom Oolong.
