Grandparents, Winter Lovers, Sweet Tooths & More: Tea for Everybody
The gift-giving apex of the holiday season draws near, as Hanukkah now is in its fifth day, Christmas arrives on Sunday, and on Monday the week of Kwanzaa begins.
May everybody enjoy healthy, happy holidays, surrounded by friends, family, community and cheer.
We love roaming through our inventory of more than 200 teas every year, searching for gift ideas. Customers love our gift boxes, which offer everything from teas from the storied WuYi Mountains in China, a holiday-themed gift box to tea collections that pay homage to our beloved Rocky Mountains. Our build-your-own tea box program is quite popular, too. And then there’s all of us at Team Ku Cha, thinking about teas that might align especially well with certain kinds of people, such as artists or mountain jocks.
No matter the person or occasion, we believe that tea makes a superb gift. Thoughtful teas introduce gift recipients to new flavors, styles and expressions of different regions around the world. They of course are extremely portable and don’t take up much space. Many teas are quite affordable, but just as with wine, the universe of options ranges from the everyday to the special occasion kind of tea.
One particular thrill for us: Learning that the recipient of a Ku Cha tea gift became smitten with her present, and grew much more interested in the wide world of tea. It’s endlessly fascinating!
In this guide to tea gifts, we focus on three potential recipients: teas for people who love winter; teas for people with sweet tooths; and teas for grandparents.
Tea Gifts for Everyone: Winter Lovers
Our home state, Colorado, is full of them: people for whom winter is their favorite season. We don’t often encounter such winter love elsewhere in the country. In the Northeast and Midwest, the winters can be gloomy and depressing. Many people flee to Florida, the South, Arizona and California in an effort to escape what for them is the most dreaded season. Winter in the Pacific Northwest is heavy on rain, and light on snow. But here in Colorado, winter means blue skies, sun, snow, and mountains full of ski slopes and both Nordic and snowshoe trails. It’s wonderful.
We favor most teas across the cold season; after all, most tea is served hot, and both sipping it and cradling a mug warms our bodies. We think the following three teas are perfect for any winter lover.
Winter Wonderland
Toasted walnuts, and rosemary, apple and anise, cinnamon and rose hip and more. This beauty hits loads of wintry notes, but gets balanced with bursts of the tropics, with pineapple and dragon fruit. And then, thanks to golden sugar stars, the brew turns into a blizzard of sparkles reminiscent of a glinting winter wonderland.
Balance Tea
This tea, blended in accordance with Ayurvedic principles of balance for the sake of harmony in both body and mind, stands as a superb choice for a winter tea. For one thing, the mix of ingredients — cinnamon, cardamom, licorice root, coriander, fennel, ginger root and rose — offers warm flavors we often associate with cold winter. But we also appreciate how it helps deliver balance; when it’s frigid outside, we sometimes can feel a little discombobulated, as we can get stuck inside for too long and often carry ourselves tightly, to protect against cold.
Enchanted Forest
Forests and winter complement each other. When everything else is coated in a blanket of white, forests offer texture and color that might be lacking elsewhere. And the atmospherics of snow-draped conifers please even the most hardcore Scrooge.
A base of both green tea and green mate threaded with coconut shreds, rose petals, cornflower blossoms and natural cherry flavor, this this tea is reminiscent of a scrumptious slice of Black Forest cherry cake. A winter fave!
Tea Gifts for Everyone: People with Sweet Tooths
Traditional Camellia sinensis tea is bitter; it’s one reason that so many styles of tea incorporate sweeteners, from British high tea to Indian chai to American iced tea. But not all kinds of tea present bitter notes; and some that do include Camellia sinensis, like chai, are always served sweet. While we don’t sweeten classic Chinese and Japanese teas, like oolongs and senchas, we appreciate tea traditions that do transform our favorite beverage into drinks with at least whispers of sweetness.
Rooibos Truffle
A Ku Cha classic! Looking for a rich tea, something that evokes a chocolate truffle in a cup? Then our Rooibos Truffle tea is for you. This caffeine-free blend leans into rooibos, a South African shrub that South Africans brew into tea and drink all day, every day. To this earthy base, we add dark chocolate and coconut. Anybody with a sweet tooth will champion this tea. And even those who shrink from sweet should appreciate it; the tea isn’t cloyingly sweet. It’s a bit perfect.
Firefly Chai
People who enjoy the sweeter things in life should all explore chai. While the tea blend themselves normally lack sweetener, the traditional way to enjoy any chai is with sweetener and some kind of milk, from traditional cow dairy milk to milk made from cashews. We carry about a dozen chais, all of the custom blends. This one stands out for its depth and harmony; the flavors of vanilla and cardamom harmonize perfectly with the black tea. This spicy thing of beauty also contains warming spices: ginger, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Brew a pot of this, spike it with local honey, soften it with a dollop of coconut milk. Heavenly.
Lemon Sonata
Where Firefly Chai and Rooibos Truffle present as bold and rich, our Lemon Sonata is more like a garden party: subtle pastels and gentle grass and soft blossoms. And it responds wonderfully to sweeteners, which round out and brighten the teas range of summery flavors. Our custom Lemon Sonata includes ginger, lemon, pineapple, apple, basil, blackberry leaves and moringa leaves.
Tea Gifts for Everyone: Grandparents
Those of us who are lucky enough to have enjoyed heart-stirring relationships with grandparents understand their power. Good grandparents deliver deep love and wisdom. They improve our lives, and when they are gone they spangle our memories with smiles.
Buying gifts for them, however, isn’t the easiest task. Often, all they want is to spend time with their grandchildren. And that is the best gift we can bestow upon them. But we know from experience that tea agrees with many seniors. It’s gentler on the stomach than coffee, and offers a huge variety of health benefits. We know many grandparents and seniors who savor long mornings and afternoons sipping warm tea.
Immortal Tea
We would like for them to live forever. Unfortunately, we can’t make that happen. But we can offer a special tea, Immortal Tea, that might help prolong their lives. The tea is called immortal for good reason! This teas manifold health advantages revolve largely around two ingredients: the well-known adaptogen ginseng, and the little-known (outside of China) adaptogen jiaogulan. People in China turn to both of these adaptogens to improve vitality and vigor. Ginseng, a root found in parts of Asia and North America, contributes a subtle sweetness to our Immortal Tea. Jiaogulan, a climbing vine native to China and other parts of Asia, is known as “the herb of immortality” due to the way it makes people feel and its potent antioxidant and adaptogenic effects.
Immunitea
Immunity health is of mighty importance to seniors. Conditions like influenza, which younger people normally power through without much fuss other than upset stomachs, can level seniors. It kills elderly people, too. This blend leans into ginkgo, known as a “youthful” herb for its ability to promote blood circulation, heart health and brain function. In addition, our Immunitea incorporates echinacea, a flower that naturopathic doctors around the world prescribe to boost immune strength. With peach rooibos for flavor and marshmallow root and chamomile for additional health and flavor benefits, this tea is perfect for gramma or grandpa.
Young Spring Green Tea
Tea, the most widely consumed beverage in the world after water, has undergone loads of medical studies. And the evidence is clear: green tea is good for you. We knew that already, but it’s gratifying that science agrees. This tasty green tea is picked in the early Spring, as new leaves emerge from the tea plant, thus its name. With a vegetal and slightly nutty character, this tea makes a great green tea for every day consumption. As we think everybody, but maybe especially seniors, should drink green tea every day, this excellent tea stands as a superb — and quite affordable — choice for nana and papa.
