Tea: The OG Functional Beverage!
Among other things, 2022 saw the dramatic rise in the natural foods industry of a category called “functional beverages.” At the natural and organic industry’s two huge trade shows this year, Expo West (in Anaheim) and Expo East (in Philadelphia), functional beverages claimed a spotlight. And across the year, the category received a flood of press covering the burgeoning trend.
What’s a functional beverage? While it is fairly wide ranging, the profile of a typical functional beverage leans into herbs, roots, spices, seeds and more to precipitate desired effects, such as calm, energy, creativity and so on.
The coverage suggested that the places where beverages and targeted health benefits intersect is new; that until 2022, the the “functional” aspects of beverages didn’t veer far from caffeine (coffee, tea and energy drinks) and probiotics (kombucha and other fermented, probiotic laced drinks).
Tea Offers Huge Variety of Functional Botanicals
But people have turned to tea for specific health advantages for thousands of years. Tea is the OG functional beverage!
We celebrate the rise of the functional beverage category, which has yielded a diversity of new products in the refrigerated shelves of our grocery stores. Beverages containing mushrooms like reishi and lion’s mane? Plenty of them now; precious few just two years ago. Drinks with the root ashwagandha? Spiked with the leaf holy basil? Packed with chrysanthemum, electrolytes, cassava root and vitamins like B12? Indeed to all of the above.
As consumers consider new functional beverages, it is important that they also understand that most of the ingredients in ready-to-drink functional beverages are found in glorious tea. And where functional beverages normally come in cans or bottles, tea presents a simpler and more straightforward engagement with the key ingredients. You’ll see them, whole, in the teas that we sell. You control their concentration in your brews, either through the length of time you steep, or the amount of tea you use in the pot.
As we sink deeper into the holiday season, we here offer a range of teas custom-designed for different kinds of people and pursuits. Merge with the functional beverage zeitgeist, and do it through tea! You will savor the benefits.
Tea as Functional Beverage: For Athletes
Sure, athletes desire energy. And caffeine serves as an outstanding functional ingredient to boost it. But thriving as a jock requires more than the stuff that delivers zing and zip. Hydration matters. Management of inflammation helps. Detox can benefit athletes, too — they want their bodies firing on all cylinders without impediments.
For everybody out there who engages with physical activity, from hiking to running to playing basketball or snowboarding and a million things in between, we offer three teas that will improve your experiences.
This special Ku Cha blend, created in collaboration with CU Boulder’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA), combines ripe puerh and premium black tea, both from Yunnan Province – the origin of all the world’s teas. Both the puerh and black tea provide caffeine, and thus energy. But the puerh, which is fermented tea, also helps optimize digestion, which is important for people tearing down slopes or cycling up hills. The blend also incorporates orange peel and cinnamon, both of which provide benefits. Cinnamon, for example, contains polyphenol antioxidants, which act like insulin in the body. These antioxidants help move glucose into cells, which speeds up the movement of sugar into muscles, which is key for fuel.
Some athletes shrink from caffeine, because it interferes with their digestion or they don’t appreciate how it can spike and then crash. For these jocks, our Rooibos Chai is perfect.
This special chai’s athletic advantage revolves around the rooibos, a South African shrub that people in the country drink constantly. Electrolytes pack rooibos, and electrolytes are vital for effective hydration. Where some people turn to sugary drinks like Gatorade that contain added electrolytes, others just keep it simple and far healthier, by sipping rooibos drinks. This chai also contains classic spices: cinnamon, ginger and anise, all of which are important for digestion, as well as black pepper, cardamom, cloves and bay leaf.
This caffeine-free blend does help increase energy, but mainly through the inclusion of ginkgo and rosehip, with support the circulatory system and as a result gently boost energy. At the same time, the nettle leaf in our Tired Bone Blend mitigates inflammation, which serves as pure balm for those joints turned achy and weary from the marathon training or the hockey game. This tea also contains lemon balm, lavender and chamomile.
Tea as Functional Beverage: For Artists
Exhaustion and creativity do not align in complementary ways. To help power artists through creative projects, without amping them up too much with caffeine, we recommend our Midafternoon Blahs tea. The outstanding bland incorporates gentle Japanese sencha tea, which provides light amounts of caffeine. It also contains peppermint and lemongrass, which awaken the taste buds and enliven the mind. This is an ideal afternoon tea for anybody toiling to finish that novel, paint the Flatirons or work on the lyrics for the new song.
Just as Midafternoon Blahs turned to light Japanese sencha for its dose of caffeine, Cloud Forest White incorporates gentle white tea for its dollop of functional zest. Artists of all stripes can sip this gorgeous tea all day to remain alert without getting the jitters that come from intense caffeine drinks. But it offers much more than white tea: rosehips, hibiscus, sunflower, cornflower, osmanthus, rose, safflower and calendula also populate this extremely diverse blend. We think the density of blossoms in in this tea is immensely stimulating and evocative. Prepare for intense artistic achievements!
The artistic process is a meditative one; few artists complete their greatest achievements in between errands. Making art requires focus and experiencing the “zone,” that meditative state wherein ideas and expressions combine into something much greater than the sum of their parts. Our meditation herbal incorporates yerba mate, a South American shrub that people in a handful of countries drink around the clock. Yerba mate does contain caffeine, but the caffeine quotient is light. This blend also includes ginkgo, which increases blood circulation and is famous worldwide for its ability to jumpstart mental activity and enhance memory. In addition, you will taste cinnamon, black pepper, lavender, marshmallow and rose.
Tea as Functional Beverage: For Sleep-Deprived
When life yields a busy mind and interferes with sleep, instead of spending the night tossing and turning drink our Nighttime Herbal blend an hour or so before hitting the sack. With popular herbal sleep tonics like chamomile, catnip, peppermint and a sleep powerhouse, valerian root, this tea will help drift you away from those chaotic thoughts and sink into la-la land.
This collaboration with CU Boulder’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA), the sibling tea to CHA Awake, helps with both sleep and just general mellowing out. Green Rooibos, a native herbal tea from South Africa, is rich in vitamins and electrolytes. Gingko and elderflower can help with blood circulation and fight allergies. And chamomile is used worldwide to achieve rest and peace. This tea also contains spearmint, for a soothing, cool flavor.
Many teas that improve sleep rely on the flower chamomile, at least in part, for their efficacy. In fact, the previous two teas in this section include chamomile. The highly aromatic and unique flower clearly is a valuable sleep partner, and we recommend trying it on its own — just straight-up chamomile. The flavor is strong and novel — one sip of chamomile and you understand what you are drinking. It’s naturally sweet and slightly pungent — we think it has honey notes. Chamomile tea is one of our favorites to drink before going to bed.
