Savor Holiday Tea to Sink Into the Season’s Cheer
Flavors and aromas captivate the holidays. No other stretch of weeks in the calendar arrives so aligned with sensory touchstones: nutmeg and cinnamon, evergreen and citrus, vanilla and peppermint and chocolate.
While COVID may have muted holiday entertaining this year, it has not evacuated cheer from the season. We still wrap gifts in bright paper, hang wreaths on doors, and festoon homes with colored lights. And we feast: gingerbread cookies, sparkling punches, hams and turkeys, eggnog.
Celebrating the holidays with tea comes easy. Many of our teas revel in the holidays’ parade of smells and tastes.
With just a bit more than three weeks until 2021 (whew!), let’s sip our way across the days with special holiday teas. All of these teas can be purchased separately. But we also offer a Holiday Sample Pack, which packages them all in tins in one box. It makes for a great gift for friends and family, as well as yourself!
Holiday Tea: Winter Wonderland
We developed this custom blend as an ideal reflection of the holidays. Looking for a sip to invite cheer into your day? This is a great place to start.
Our Winter Wonderland blend features one of the season’s most prominent features: cinnamon. But instead of offering the full slate of dominant holiday flavors, including spices like ginger and nutmeg, it explores other textures that also permeate December, in minor keys.
The tea’s rosemary reminds us of the spiced nuts we consume every chance we get. Its anise reminds us of holiday baking, especially if we grew up eating biscochitos, the state cookie of New Mexico. Instead of turning to orange for fruit notes, this blend celebrates pineapple, which might top your holiday ham, as well lilac dragon fruit. The blend offers apple, too, bringing us back to memories of apple pies.
One of the tea’s most interesting ingredients? Walnuts. We all compulsively munch on walnuts during the season, and their flavor is welcome in Winter Wonderland. But the nuts also add texture to the tea, giving it a bit more weight than most.
Winter Wonderland is pure Happy Holidays.
Holiday Tea: Winter Chai
With their spice blends, most chais stand as wonderful holiday teas. We find our organic Winter Chai, however, to be especially well-suited.
For one thing, it offers cinnamon and ginger, which in many ways serve as sturdy sensory foundations for the holidays. And like Winter Wonderland, it incorporates rosemary into the blend. It adds a spice twist with cardamom, a lovely holiday background note that we appreciate in certain baked German and Austrian cookies as well as Scandinavian baked goods.
But this one adds cacao, which suggests the hot chocolates we buy while out holiday shopping, as well as the ones we make at home on a cold afternoon. And then it punches up the flavor with cayenne pepper. The cayenne adds a warming touch to Winter Chai, one that is especially welcome during the cold months.
Holiday Tea: Hot Cinnamon
Cinnamon rolls in the mornings, on the days off from work. Sugar cookies cut out into the shapes of snowflakes and snowgirls, dusted with cinnamon. So many foods during the season turn to cinnamon for flavor. If you love the taste, our Hot Cinnamon tea is a cinnamon bonanza.
The black tea is fortified with three types of cinnamon. To that triad of taste we add orange peel and cloves, both of which also color the holiday season.
We savor Hot Cinnamon on its own. But it’s spectacular when blended with milk, too. Interested in adding more cinnamon flavor to the sugar cookies on the plate before you? Dip them in Hot Cinnamon.
Holiday Tea: Holiday Apple Frost
We think our Holiday Apple Frost blend is a winning variation on our line of holiday teas. Where most of them are either herbal or involve black tea, this one turns to Japanese sencha, a green tea filled with subtle herbal and grassy flavors, with a buttery finish.
That buttery component complements the rest of the ingredients — including apple, orange peel, almonds and rose — in spectacular fashion. In some ways, Holiday Apple Frost is like the essence of holiday baking in a mug, including the butter in the pastries! Only with this blend, there’s no dairy (unless you decide to add some, to which we do not object). Instead, it’s juste sencha’s lovely buttery background notes.
Holiday Tea: Choco Pear
We often receive boxes of pears during the holiday season, and we treasure them. Few edible things are as beautiful as fully ripe pears, eaten out of hand. Make sure to have napkins ready to capture the juice. Pears poached in wine and baking spices? Count us in. Roasted pears with duck? Perfect.
We also crave pear slices dipped into chocolate. And so our Choco Pear tea speaks to us during the holidays.
This blend rests on a green tea foundation, and then adds pears, cocoa and one of those foundational holiday spices: ginger.
If you, like us, are crazy for pears and chocolate, then this tea is just the ticket for boosting holiday cheer.
Holiday Tea: Chocolate Mint
Pears and chocolate rock. But the combination of mint and chocolate is more widespread during the holidays. If you have ever used a cinnamon stick to stir hot chocolate in a mug, you understand. If you have never done this, we highly recommend it.
We also urge you to try this alluring holiday blend. Our Chocolate Mint is a black tea spiked with peppermint and chocolate flavor. Simple. And oh so special. Pro tip: For the full hot cocoa with peppermint stick effect, add some milk to the tea.
