The Gift That Keeps on Giving: Taste of the Rockies Tea Box
For those who celebrate Christmas, the countdown is upon us. In just two days, presents get unwrapped, people wearing green and red sip eggnog, and the dining table groans under the weight of a feast.
But many are not quite ready — count us among them! We need to find last-minute gifts for the new friend, for the picky uncle, for the hard-to-buy-for mom.
Consider tea, friends. Specifically, check out our Taste of the Rockies gift box, which contains six teas that we custom-designed to reflect our mountain state.
The gift suits friends and family who already love tea; while they may have sipped black and green tea plenty of times, chances are they haven’t savored a tea with Rocky Mountain huckleberries in it, or yet tried a blend containing yerba mate, a South American shrub.
It also appeals to tea newbies, offering them tastes of traditional black tea, chai and more.
The gift box is local — Ku Cha House of Tea is your Colorado source for the world’s finest teas. It celebrates our gorgeous Rocky Mountains. And it’s the gift that keep on giving; recipients could be enjoying these days well into summer.
Happy Holidays, everybody! We hope it is the merriest ever.
Taste of the Rockies: Organic Rocky Mountain Breakfast
We think of this tea as a two-fer: it is unusual in that it features Assam black tea from Northern India — Assam is the big-leafed tea that is native to India — and Keemun black tea from East China’s Anhui province.
Mild mountain climates with abundant rain and cloud-hugged forests — ideal for tea cultivation — dominate both regions. While Colorado mountains aren’t especially rain-saturated, they normally (fingers crossed!) do attract enormous amounts of precipitation, in the form of snow.
So just one sip of this, and Uncle Santiago experiences two different and compelling black teas. This blend brews malty, smooth and strong, with a pleasing fragrance evocative of conifers and a long, lingering finish. We love it on its own, but the tea also is bold enough to play well with milks and sweeteners.
Taste of the Rockies: FoCo Cocoa
Tea doesn’t always have to be just about Camellia sinensis, the shrub native to China that produces most of the world’s tea. Herbal teas skip Camellia sinensis altogether, and other teas, like Earl Grey, combine traditional tea with other flavors. In the case of Earl Grey, that means the Italian citrus fruit bergamot.
And with FoCo Cocoa, developed and named by our excellent Fort Collins team, the additions to black tea are chocolate, vanilla and cinnamon.
This beauty is sure to appeal to … well … just about everybody. What’s not to like about a black tea that invites such enchanting flavors into the brew? Just one sip from Aunt Prisha, and she will understand why FoCo folks go loco for FoCo Cocoa.
Taste of the Rockies: Organic Mile High Chai
The cousin from Davenport, Iowa, Ahmed, has never tried chai. Unacceptable! His parents came from Ethiopia, where black tea rules (in fact, Ethiopia grows quite a bit of tea), along with coffee. But tea spiked with spices never has crossed his lips.
It’s time to rock Ahmed’s world. Here comes Mile High Chai, an extravagantly flavored chai that sits on a foundation of vanilla black tea. Decorating the flavor landscape: ginger, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, black peppercorn, fennel seeds, licorice root and allspice.
This tea will turn Ahmed into a chai fanatic.
Taste of the Rockies: Organic Afternoon in the Aspens
While most of the teas in this gift box incorporate ingredients other than traditional tea leaves, our Afternoon in the Aspens doesn’t have any Camellia sinensis at all. It’s a straight herbal tea — and caffeine-free, the only one in the box that doesn’t contain it.
The new colleague Angeliki, who just moved to Denver from Thessaloniki, will take to this beguiling blend combining lemongrass, lemon verbena, rosemary and licorice root; brewed, it’s as enlivening as an afternoon hike amongst aspens. The tea broadcasts mellow lemon flavors that are complemented by licorice root’s natural sweet notes.
All tea offers health benefits. The herbal ingredients in this tea are especially well-suited for aiding digestion.
Taste of the Rockies: Rocky Mountain Huckleberry
The huckleberry, which when fully ripe has flavors similar to blueberries, grows all over the Rocky Mountain West, especially in the Pacific Northwest. But the fragile berry clusters in bushes in Colorado’s High Country, too, to the delight of bears. The tea will even thrill the brother-in-law Feng as well; maybe it will even persuade him to drink tea other than oolongs.
This tea honors the splendid berry by incorporating its flavors into a blend of Sri Lankan black tea, rosehips, cornflowers, freeze-dried raspberries (freeze-drying is the best way to preserve berries) and raspberry leaves.
The flavor profile, an appealing mix of floral and fruit, is one of our favorites for making cold tea all summer. It’s also superb hot; we like dipping biscotti into our mugs.
Taste of the Rockies: Organic Boulder Boost
She spends her days running up mountain trails, or skiing over cliffs, or piloting her mountain bike down cactus-dense canyons in the desert. In short, your sister Heidi is a classic Colorado-style jock. And she needs fuel!
Boulder Boost to the rescue.
This tea combines black tea and guayusa, a South American shrub related to yerba mate that, like the black tea in the blend, contains caffeine. To this we add rooibos, a South African shrub commonly consumed as tea in the country that is packed with hydration-boosting electrolytes. Rounding out the tea is tulsi (also called Holy Basil), a South Indian plant similar to basil that is revered across the Southeast Asian tropics for its health properties.
Go Heidi! Fill that water bottle with iced Boulder Boost, and win that 100-mile race across the Colorado High Country!
