Dial In Your Summer Beverages with Pantry Teas
We say hello to July tomorrow, a month that captures the very heart of summer. July invites beach vacations and nights spent beside streams in tents. It encourages barbecues, picnics and swinging in hammocks. The month also helps us forget about work now and again, beginning with extra oomph on July 4, which this year falls on Monday.
Speaking of which, Happy July 4!
For many of us in northern places like Colorado, the world remains verdant for another three months or more. And then winter returns, stripping the landscape of most of its color. Thank you for enchanting us with year-round green, conifers!
Embrace the long, vibrant season with abandon. And complement it with tasty tea beverages.
July is a good time to stock the pantry with affordable, versatile teas. Where winter often sends us into deep routines, summer tends to unhinge us from the cold season’s ruts. Instead of day after day of school, work, dinner and bed, summer shepherds us to paddle boards bobbing on lakes, early evening hikes wading through wildflowers and impromptu backyard get-togethers with friends. The parade of variety encourages us to keep things simple on the food and beverage front.
Consider this trio of pantry teas for your summer of good times. Chances are, you’ll quickly develop a taste for these beautiful teas, and keep them in the pantry no matter the season.
Pantry Teas: Yunnan Black
Even tea newbies have probably sipped black tea. It’s the stuff of American-style iced tea, the contents of tea bags steeped at diners across the country, the style of tea that gets sold in supermarkets in boxes of 100. And tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka grow most of that Camellia sinensis.
Some of the teas grown south of China taste wonderful. But the leaves grown for boxes of 100 bags? They represent tea at its worst. In many cases, commercial tea used for bags and iced tea is little more than tea scraps swept up from the floors of tea processing plants.
All of this is a shame — high-quality black tea enchants us every time we drink it, which is often.
In addition to our outstanding selection of primo black teas from India and Sri Lanka, we carry a range of Chinese black teas that we adore. One of them, Yunnan Black, is especially versatile. We consider this our standard pantry black tea, something we brew at least a few times a week for its smooth delicacy and sweet, slightly floral flavor. It doesn’t require sweetener or cream to counteract bitterness, as Yunnan Black lacks bitter notes while still presenting rich and full-bodied brews.
Pantry Teas: Young Spring
Green teas brewed from spring-harvested leaves can be expensive. As those young leaves and buds offer especially complex and delicate flavors, tea connoisseurs seek them out, and prices reflect keen demand.
But our Young Spring tea, comprised entirely of leaves plucked in early spring, is a value tea. This is good news — we sip a lot of it!
With a nuanced vegetal and slightly nutty character, Young Spring makes a superb (and affordable) green tea for every day consumption.
Pantry Teas: Jasmine Oolong
You might think a tea that requires farmers to harvest green tea and then blend it with night-harvested, fresh jasmine blossoms for 7 evenings or more would hit the wallet. After all, sending workers out into fields at night to pluck small, fragrant, white flowers from trees comes with a cost, one in addition to paying people to tread through tea plantations harvesting leaves.
But you would be wrong.
While our jasmine oolong is not cheap, it by no means is one of our pricier offerings. Given the steps involved with transforming tea leaves into powerhouses of floral fragrance and satisfying flavor, we think it’s a bargain.
Coming from Guangxi Province in South China, this spectacular elixir yields a bright golden brew with a smooth, sweet and refreshing taste. We so adore this tea that we selected it for one of our ready-to-drink canned offerings; it is wonderful as iced tea. We only have four canned teas, but carry hundreds. Our choice of Jasmine Oolong speaks to our affinity for the tea — we love it!
