Our blending bar contains dozens of herbs, spices, roots, flowers and more, and nearly every ingredient in the blending bar is organic
We love Boulder’s DIY spirit. Few places embody the do-it-yourself ethos like this tidy city of 100,000 people at the foothills of the Rockies.
The city’s natural foods industry alone serves as inspiration for entrepreneurs across the country. People here make charcuterie, cheese, salsa and so much more, and sell them at the Farmers’ Market. Many of them go on to become successful companies. Justin’s, an international nut butter brand, got its start at the Market. Kombucha? Plucky Rowdy Mermaid quickly grew from a kitchen recipe for the founder’s daughter to a brand on shelves from Boulder to Austin to Baltimore.
The list of companies that went from idea to successful brand is long. It dominates a big part of Boulder’s fabric.
Blend It Yourself Tea Bar a Ku Cha Treasure
To that end, when we opened Ku Cha House of Tea we understood people might enjoy custom blends, combinations of herbs and teas we develop in-house. Among our many custom blends: Afternoon in the Aspens, Congestion Blend, Immortal Tea and Organic Meditation Blend.
But given the city’s potent spirit of DIY, we believed guests might also enjoy crafting their own blends. So we opened a blending bar, a station where guests choose from dozens of herbs, spices, roots, flowers and more to build their own teas. With the exception of just a few traditional Chinese teas that we include in the blending bar, everything in the bar is certified USDA organic.
It has been a hit.
Over the years, thousands of guests have come up with favorite combinations, through trial and error.
But none of them are flying blind.
Just as a startup kombucha maker refers to experts for guidance on scobies and fermentation strategies, we at Ku Cha offer loads of guidance and tips for how to craft tea that suits guests.
DIY tea comes with much guidance from Ku Cha House of Tea
Let’s say you love snowshoeing and Nordic skiing. You pursue both of them constantly during the winter. But winter, too, is the season for all sorts of health issues, including many that affect bronchial health. Being congested does not correspond with pleasing days on snow in the mountains.
Our helpful guide reveals that ingredients like chrysanthemum, elder flower, eucalyptus leaf, strawberry leaf and echinacea help support lungs. All of them, among many others, are part of the blending bar.
Having digestion problems? A blend involving lemon verbena, lemongrass, peppermint and spearmint could help.
DIY tea blending for chai a popular feature
Crazy for chai? So are we. Classic ingredients involve allspice, anise seed, black peppercorn, cardamom, clove, fennel seed and ginger root. Play with these ingredients all that you like, and then add others. Develop a chai that might help calm you down, by adding lemon balm and lavender to the mix.
With so many ingredients, it will not be possible to exhaust the possibilities at our blending bar.
Please visit any of our Ku Cha House of Tea shops to experience the blending bar and begin your journey into custom, personalized tea blending. To get you started, we offer a few simple recipes.
Cough Blend: Equal parts peppermint, elder flower and sage.
Constipation tea: Equal parts Oolong, dandelion, fennel and lemon peel
Bush tea (A Virgin Islands blend shared by a customer, which is used for digestion): One part each of sage, peppermint and anise, and two parts lemongrass.
Tea of the Week: Organic CHA Relax
The drive to craft custom blends extends beyond our own in-house creations and the combinations devised by our guests. We also develop blends for companies and institutions — any group seeking its own custom tea.
We created one of them, CHA Relax, for the University of Colorado’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA). The Center, an important CU nexus of humanities research and education, has partnered with Ku Cha House of Tea for a series of educational events in the downtown Boulder shop. We will provide plenty more details about the partnership in coming weeks and months.
CHA Relax was such a winner that we now sell it in our shops and online as well. We appreciate, too, that the Center’s acronym, CHA, is the word for tea in China!
Our CHA Relax blend involves green rooibos (pronounced roy-boss), which is a shrub-like member of the legume family that grows in mountainous regions of South Africa. Rooibos is flooded with powerful antioxidants, vitamins and electrolytes. Its abundance of healthy properties helps mitigate tension and stress.
