Start Those Holiday Season Engines—on Friday, We’re Off!
Happy Thanksgiving, friends!
We hope you all savor the people you treasure during tomorrow’s national day of gratitude. May the gravy, and the laughs, flow.
And then it begins—the official kickoff of the December holiday season on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. All of our stores will be open, of course. We also look forward to Small Business Saturday. As a small business, it’s a special day for us.
Amongst the holiday parties, decorating and baking, the month of cheer invites a lot of shopping. Everybody from mom to colleagues to old friends figures into those big lists. Finding gifts for them all can challenge even the most organized and dutiful planner.
Thrill people on your list, with tea
Consider adding tea to your shopping agenda. For people on the list who already enjoy our favorite beverage, you’re in luck. We carry hundreds of teas at Ku Cha House of Tea, all of them hand-selected by us. Our relationships with tea farmers and merchants are extensive, forged into a sturdy foundation over two decades of doing business with the world’s extensive, complex network of tea stakeholders. These years of hard work have yielded powerful, satisfying unions. And they benefit you!
For tea newbies or those who like tea but don’t know much about it, we also serve as a valuable resource. Shopping at Ku Cha can introduce them to top examples from each category of traditional tea, or Camellia sinensis: white, green, oolong, puerh, black. In addition, we carry a huge assortment of custom blends incorporating botanicals like lavender, cinnamon, rose petals, ginger root and much more. The blends help advance tea’s fun quotient. Consider this seasonal blend: Rudolph the Red Nose Rooibos. Not only is it delicious—it’s also a heck of a lot of fun.
Happy Holidays! From Hanukkah (running from December 25 to January 2) to Christmas to Kwanzaa (December 26 to January 1) and more, Ku Cha House of Tea stands as gift central—and our staff is always here to help guide you toward ideal holiday gifts! From attractive bags and tins of loose-leaf tea to cups, pots, thermoses, strainers and plenty more, we offer gift givers a kaleidoscopic diversity of possibilities!
To begin, we will explore the teas within our Holiday Tea Gift Box. We encourage you to consider the box as a gift, of course. But we also want to spotlight the teas in the box separately. For one thing, we are eager to share more about the teas—they are stupendous. And for those who want to try just a few of the teas, instead of ordering the box, this makes it easy.
Holiday Gift Box Teas: Holiday Apple Frost Green Tea
This glorious seasonal blend begins with the Japanese green tea sencha—the most widely consumed tea in Japan. Matcha gets all of the press attention, and the Japanese of course love the powdered green tea. But it’s sencha that they drink most of the time. To this grassy, umami-boosted tea we add classic seasonal flavors: orange peel, apple, almonds and some baking spices. The tea also gets a little rose petal, for floral whispers.
Holiday Gift Box Teas: Hot Cinnamon Black Tea
Cinnamon lovers, unite! Our Hot Cinnamon Black Tea is sure to bring you all together. It’s doesn’t just contain cinnamon—it spotlights three different kinds of cinnamon! Along with cinnamon and Chinese black tea, this wonderful blend contains orange peel and sweet cloves. The holidays captured in tea!
Holiday Gift Box Teas: Vanilla Rooibos
Vanilla figures largely into holiday flavors. After all, many of the cookies come bearing wallops of the famous spice, which is native to Latin America but now grown in tropical locales around the world. This celebration of vanilla rests on a backbone of earthy, honeyed rooibos, a shrub native to South Africa that people there have sipped as tea for centuries. The tea also includes floral calendula and nutty almond slivers. The caffeine-free combination stuns—the flavor dance between the tea’s different parts joins together in synchronicity and harmony.
Holiday Gift Box Teas: Organic Winter Chai
Spicy tea to warm up cold nights! That’s the key to our Organic Winter Chai. Let’s face it—all chais can easily serve as holiday teas. With the combination of baking spices and black tea, along with the inclination to sweeten chai teas, their flavor profiles fit neatly into what we come to expect during the holidays. This Organic Winter Chai ups the ante on the spice factor, however. In addition to glorious Assam tea and cinnamon, ginger, rosemary, cardamom, bay leaf and cacao, this beauty has two kinds of pepper: red chile and cayenne pepper. Sip it while it’s snowing outside, with colored lights twinkling on mantles draped with evergreen boughs. Sip it in the morning—the black tea is a grand pick-me-up—while watching birds and bunnies hop across snow. It’s a seasonal treasure.
Holiday Gift Box Teas: Chocolate Maté
Most caffeinated teas contain traditional tea: Camellia sinensis. But that’s not the only plant that contains caffeine. Coffee, of course, offers strong jolts of the natural botanical. And so does yerba maté, a shrub indigenous to South America that people where brew into hot tea, which they pour into hollow gourds, rather than mugs or cups, and sip through straws. Our Chocolate Maté includes two kinds of maté: regular and roasted. Both offer grassy, herbal flavors, but the roasted version adds touches of smoke and toast. This gem of a blend also contains cacao nibs and chocolate chips, which marry well with the yerba maté’s flavors. We add peppercorns to this blend, to help amp the spice profile. And then it also contains the super-earthy and wonderful spice cumin and nutty coconut. Finally, it also contains a little bit of dried yoghurt, which helps create a luscious mouthfeel.
