Savor Heart-Healthy Rooibos Tea for Valentine’s Day
Happy Valentine’s Day, friends!
We hope love floods your day on Thursday. Whether Valentine’s Day means a romantic dinner, an uplifting phone call to a distant relative, an evening of games with the kids, or a night out with friends, we trust that love will stoke the events.
We celebrate love’s big day in style at all of our Ku Cha stores, spangling the interiors with Valentine’s Day decorations and engaging with our wonderful community of tea lovers. We love you all!
Our love both for tea and our community informs our selection of teas—we only source whole-leaf tea, for example, because the quality is uniformly far superior to tea that comes packaged in tea bags. In addition, we carefully curate the whole-leaf teas that we bring into our stores, researching the farms behind them, scrutinizing the quality of the teas and making sure that our selection is broad and deep, without being too overwhelming.
A Perfect Valentine’s Tea: Rooibos
One category of tea that we have grown to love is rooibos, or Aspalathus linearis, the name of a broom-like member of the Fabaceae family (commonly referred to as the legume family) that grows in South Africa’s fynbos biome. The mountainous and coastal region of the country, especially the Cederberg mountains where rooibos grows in abundance, enjoys a Mediterranean climate, with rainy winters.
About 300 years ago, people discovered that pouring hot water over the plant’s leaves and letting them steep yielded a delicious tea. In time, too, people began to understand that sipping rooibos delivered health benefits, from quenched thirst to caffeine-free energy to an overall sense of well-being and vitality. Now, people across South Africa drink rooibos like crazy—and their embrace grows warmer every year. According to the Rooibos Council, consumption of black tea among consumers decreased between 2011 and 2015, falling from 58.6% to 51.5%. Meanwhile, rooibos sipping increased over the same period, from 29.4% in 2011 to 30.9% in 2015.
South Africans love their rooibos, and so do we. At Ku Cha, we carry straight-up rooibos — the more familiar oxidized and fermented version, which is reddish brown, and has a sweet, nutty and slightly woody taste, as well as green rooibos, which gets chopped, steamed and dried prior to oxidation, and has a lighter, grassier, more vegetal flavor.
In addition to the classics, Ku Cha offers an addition 12 iterations of rooibos, each with its own different flavor combinations, from Rooibos Vanilla to Rooibos Earl Grey, Pumpkin and Creamsicle.
Rooibos for Heart Health
No matter which rooibos you choose, it will deliver a bounty of health advantages, including surrounding a topic that is especially appropriate for Valentine’s Day — heart health.
The key to rooibos’s health benefits revolves around its bounty of antioxidants, which include aspalathin and quercetin. Antioxidants are molecules that fight free radicals roaming throughout the body. We don’t like free radicals, compounds that are linked to many illnesses and diseases. What we do want is natural substances that keep free radicals in check — and antioxidants fill that bill. Among other things, studies show that rooibos may boost heart health by improving blood pressure markers. Research also suggests that the plant may lower the “bad” cholesterol, LDL, while raising the good kind, HDL, for those at risk of heart disease.
We trumpet the many health aids that rooibos delivers. But the best part is that rooibos imbibers savor wonderful flavors while helping their bodies. This is awfully tasty tea, and due to the plant’s high volume of electrolytes, which are minerals, it’s also unusually good at satisfying thirst. What is the special ingredient in so many sports drinks, including the OG Gatorade? Electrolytes. With rooibos, the minerals come naturally.
Valentine’s Day is just a week away — time to stock up on heart-healthy and delicious rooibos tea!
Rooibos Tea for Hearts: Rooibos Truffle
Chocolate with your rooibos? Absolutely — it’s for Valentine’s Day! Don’t worry, though: this is not an overly sweet tea. Instead, it combines the naturally fetching flavor of rooibos with dark chocolate, both of which are complemented by coconut.
In addition to the health benefits already described, rooibos can help with sleep, headaches and cramps and allergies. This beauty serves as a perfect partner for a lovely Valentine’s.
Rooibos Tea for Hearts: Be Happy Tea
We may desire many things on Valentine’s Day, like love, friendship and camaraderie. One experience we definitely seek is simple and straightforward: happiness. It should be a happy day.
We’ve got a rooibos tea for that! This peach rooibos broadcasts a bright flavor, thanks to the lemon peel in the blend. That combination, peach and lemon, is pretty sunny. But it’s the St. John’s Wort that delivers the extra wallop of good feelings. Naturopathic physicians around the world prescribe St. John’s Wort, a flower, to treat symptoms of depression and malaise. The flower, native to Europe and Asia, found purchase in North America many decades ago, and now proliferates.
Looking for a mood boost? This is the rooibos for you, and one that will ensure your Valentine’s Day is awash in smiles.
Rooibos Tea for Hearts: Rooibos Provence
Romantic, beautiful places dot the globe, from Telluride to Kyoto to Marrakesh, Bogota and Kauai. And then there’s Provence, that patch of southern France perfumed by lavender and wild herbs, dense with flowers, and threaded with mountains, beaches, breathtaking valleys and ancient villages. When it comes to romance, Provence offers it in great, crashing waves.
We can’t deliver you to the land of bouillabaisse, ratatouille, aioli and tapenade. But we can at least conjure some of its atmospheres, thanks to our Rooibos Provence tea.
This delicious and fragrant brew broadcasts a perfect balance of earthy and sweet, fruity and floral. Its smooth finish is just as pleasant as walking in a Provencal garden. As a caffeine-free blend, it is also a great option for kids and those sensitive to caffeine.
With elderberry, rosehips, blueberry, rose petals and lavender, in addition to rooibos, this tea will carry you away to a quaint farmhouse in the country, with gentle Mediterranean breezes washing over you and the sound of the sea in the distance.
