Cheering Pride Week With Ku Cha’s Rainbow of Tea
Boulder County Pride week begins on Monday. It’s an annual celebration that we anticipate with keen enthusiasm. The United States is so richly diverse, which serves as one of its foundations. One of the best parts is how so many people warmly embrace diversity of all stripes. Count us among the embracers!
We love how the beautiful rainbow has become Pride’s symbol, how rainbows decorate downtown Boulder sidewalks and shop windows and how they emblazon streetscapes from Athens, GA to Chicago to Salt Lake City and Tacoma. Look around — rainbows brighten the United States from everywhere.
To celebrate Pride, we crafted a selection of teas that reflect colors in different ways. Together, these teas create a rainbow.
Happy Pride Week, Boulder!
Ku Cha’s Rainbow of Tea
Peony White — White
There isn’t a tea that literally brews white, although heavy additions of cream could turn it whitish. Either way, it stands as an outstanding example of white tea, a style of tea that experiences minimal oxidation, compared to oolong, black and pu-erh teas.
White teas are often fragrant and nuanced. They also can offer bold flavors, such as our Peony White, which is also known as Pai Mu Tan. This delicate tea, from southern China’s Fujian Province, is crafted from young tea buds and leaves that emerge in early spring. The harvest then oxidizes briefly in the sun, a natural process that gives the tea a warm, rich sweetness.
While delicate and complex, Peony White’s flavor is far from pale! It offers wonderful floral aromas that are reminiscent of fruit blossoms.
Organic Green — Green
This is a go-to daily green tea in our home. The Chinese green has a slightly sweet, vegetal and nutty character, offering character without being over-the-top. Even we sometimes get tired of teas, including rare and prized ones, after drinking them day after day. But our Organic Green never grows old. We like it warm in the morning, we savor it iced on a hot day. It pairs beautifully with gingery stir fries, teriyaki-glazed chicken thighs, poached salmon. It’s an all-around outstanding green tea. We love, too, that it is organic.
Yunnan Black — Black
This tea isn’t exactly a rainbow. But the leaves come in both black and gold, which we think is pretty awesome. Gold tea leaves? Yes indeedy. Yunnan Black comes from Yunnan Province in southwestern China, and borders Myanmar and Laos. It’s warm in spots, mountainous and snowy in others, and full of parks and temples.
Yunnan Black, Yunnan’s most famous tea, has a delicate, sweet and slightly floral flavor. It also offers great richness and depth — a bold, complex, black tea.
Peach Rooibos — Red
If you haven’t tried rooibos tea, it’s time to get started! And our Peach Rooibos is a wonderful place to start. Leaves from the rooibos shrub, which is native to South Africa, stand as the foundation of this tea. Rooibos tea on its own projects earthy, herbal flavors. To rooibos we add calendula, a flower with a peppery flavor profile, and peach pieces.
Rooibos tea delivers caffeine-free health benefits, most famously its quotient of electrolytes. As such, it is excellent for hydration, among many other things. When combined with calendula and peach, this red tea is ambrosial. It’s fantastic iced, too.
Blue Spring Oolong — Blue
This unique oolong is one of our best-selling teas. It’s a personal favorite, too. Oolong represents only 2 percent of the world’s tea. But for tea lovers, it often harnesses far more than just 2 percent of tea consumption. For some of us, oolong accounts for 75 percent or more.
Enzymes found in Camellia sinensis, the shrub from which all traditional tea is harvested, change color when exposed to oxygen after harvest. Green teas barely get oxidized; black teas, on the other hand, undergo extensive oxidation. Oolongs fall in the middle.
To make our Blue Spring Oolong, tea farmers roll harvested leaves into tight pellets, and then coat them with powder from the licorice root. The result: A rich tea with a sweet aftertaste that soothes sore throats and promotes focused mental energy.
Lemon Sonata — Yellow
Looking for a summer tea? You can’t beat Lemon Sonata, a new bespoke blend. This caffeine-free beauty is meant for a garden party!
Lemon Sonata’s ingredients — ginger, lemon, pineapple, basil, blackberry leaves and moringa — together create a harmonious chorus of flavors and textures. They also help with digestion, reduce inflammation and calm a rambunctious stomach.
Cloud Chaser — Lavender
Pride Week always lifts our mood. It seems to improve the disposition of most people with whom it comes into contact. Ready to make the mood downright jubilant? Then sip some Cloud Chaser tea across the week of events.
This intriguing blend captures an essence of the Mediterranean, with lavender, lemon balm, marjoram and mint. But then it adds floral elements from rose petals. And finally, Cloud Chaser incorporates St. John’s Wort, a wildflower native to Eurasia and abundant across North and South America. Health practitioners around the world prescribe St. John’s Wort to patients suffering from depression.
We routinely sip Cloud Chaser, and we’re awfully sunny. Just sayin’… But then again, we are lucky enough to spend our days working with tea, the most glorious plant in the world. We can’t be sure our chipper moods come from St. John’s Wort, but you never know!
Pink Pomegranate — Pink
The teas included so far in this rainbow offer herbal, grassy, earthy, floral and citrus flavors. But the rainbow is missing one flavor category: sweet.
Problem solved. The last addition to our rainbow of tea, Pink Pomegranate, turns mostly to fruit (rather than sugar) to brew a sweet and satisfying tea. Pomegranate, pineapple, dragon fruit and apple offer the sweet touches. Hibiscus infuses the tea with lovely floral flavors. And finally, a scattering of yogurt crunch boosts the sweet quotient while adding a whisper of milk to the brew.
This is a gorgeous tea, and a customer favorite.
Few food products offer as much diversity as tea. Traditional teas alone, numbering in the thousands, offer up a huge variety of flavors and colors. Throw in things like rooibos, spices and herbs, and the medley grows exponentially vast.
The same goes for human diversity. Pride celebrations trumpet diversity in myriad ways, and from every direction.
Again — Happy Pride Week!
