College Brings Students Back to Campus—and Creates Fresh Demand for Tea
For college freshmen, the leap from home and parents to a dorm, new friends and challenging courses represents an enormous life change. A similarly expansive chasm separates senior year of college from those entering the work force. In between, college presents students with a parade of new experiences, anxieties and thrills.
Food often is an afterthought; little more than budget fuel. Sleep gets challenged. Mornings serve as rude awakenings.
The students need help! And we are here for them, stimulating their minds, ratcheting back their stress, offering them jolts of energy and shepherding them to sleep—with tea.
For college students, beverages should be about more than caffeine and booze
The stereotype about college beverages see-saws between coffee and caffeine-intense drinks, and beer. In other words, up and down. But most of college life dwells in the in-between zones.
Caffeine might rouse students after a poor sleep. And for those who dip into adult beverages, the lagers, hard seltzers and margaritas might help temporarily numb a mind that aches with pressures. But the majority of the college experience revolves around ping-ponging between classrooms, listening to lectures, studying, taking tests, writing papers, hanging out with friends and occasionally heading out for pizza. And tea is a perfect companion for all of the above. It jumpstarts the day (because many teas contain caffeine). And it soothes that throbbing brain.
We think tea is the ideal study partner. It contains less caffeine than coffee or energy drinks, which mitigates the jitters and scattered thinking that comes with excessive caffeine. But tea contains enough of the plant compound to ripen healthy mental stimulation. In addition, the zip that comes from tea doesn’t land like a punch. Instead of offering sippers intense spikes that inevitably get followed with crashes, tea provides consistent, steady energy. It’s the perfect level of zest for engaging with books, labs, professors, classrooms and all-day studying.
College also serves as an excellent time to develop a tea habit. Once students begin exploring the healthiest beverage in the world, they get hooked. Tea becomes a lifelong passion.
To get them started on their college tea journey, we suggest a quartet of teas that offers myriad benefits, from tantalizing flavor to beneficial energy and stress relief.
Teas for College Students: CHA Awake
Tea and scholarship go hand in hand in China, Japan and other Asian countries. In fact, early in its history tea was mostly reserved for scholars. The union between tea and intellectual work is so strong that we collaborated with the University of Colorado’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA, which coincidentally means tea in Chinese) to create a pair of custom tea blends. One of them provokes mental stimulation, and the other to helps calm the minds of those who devote so much time and effort to thinking.
Our CHA Awake is one of those teas—the one designed to get the mental gears turning. This beauty combines our spectacular Yunnan Black—a delightful Chinese black tea—with organic ripe puerh, the famous fermented tea from the country’s Yunnan Province. Puerh delivers complex flavors and many health benefits, thanks to the fermentation process. The addition of organic orange peel and organic cinnamon adds to the tea’s already fantastic flavor.
With two kinds of traditional tea in the blend, CHA Awake provides essential energy, but without the counterproductive side-effects of anxiousness nervousness. Meanwhile, the orange and cinnamon add another kind of vigor, due to bright flavors. It’s a common go-to tea for all of us at Ku Cha House of Tea.
Teas for College Students: Organic CHA Relax
Just as CHA Awake revs students’ engines, its counterpart, CHA Relax, helps slow those thinking machines, bringing them down from a steady roar to a musical whisper. This tea leans into rooibos, which is tea made from a South African shrub by the same name. Many rooibos’s are roasted—we carry quite a few. But green rooibos is raw, offering more grassy and herbal flavors. All rooibos’s are packed with electrolytes, minerals that fight free radicals and improve hydration.
To rooibos we add elder flower (which is superb for immunity), chamomile (a classic herbal sedative) and spearmint (another outstanding botanical that contributes toward serenity). One of the health keys to Cha Relax, however, is ginkgo leaf. The leaves from the ancient ginkgo tree—it’s often called a living fossil—are widely used among naturopaths to help improve mental faculties, from memory to problem solving.
Teas for College Students: Blue Spring Oolong
Blue Spring Oolong is a classic oolong from China’s Fujian Province combined with licorice root. The oolong floods students with pretty flavors and even, steady energy from its balanced quotient of caffeine. After the large tea leaves are harvested, they then get coated with powder from licorice root. The rich, sweet aftertaste from the licorice soothes sore throats and improves digestion (a welcome benefit for those burger-and-pizza eating students).
The combination is so wonderful that Blue Spring Oolong now is one of the most popular teas at Ku Cha House of Tea.
Teas for College Students: Organic Boulder Boost
Sometimes, especially first thing in the morning, students want—and maybe it’s really more like need—larger wallops of caffeine. And for those groggy zones shortly after the alarm clock’s blare, our Organic Boulder Boost is just the ticket.
For this tea, we combine black tea scented with Madagascar vanilla and guayusa, a plant similar to yerba mate. The black tea-guayusa two-step—guayusa contains caffeine—ramps up the energy, and gives sippers quick boosts. But we decorate this powerful tea other botanicals that bring a range of health advantages to the tea party. Like CHA Relax, it contains green rooibos. For this custom blend, we also incorporated tulsi, also known as “holy basil” in India, which comes loaded with healthy antioxidants. In addition, it’s got cinnamon (among other things, a powerful adaptogen), ginger (fantastic for digestion and gut health), allspice, fennel and rose.
We crafted Boulder Boost long ago to suit our city’s many outdoor enthusiasts, from mountain bikers to climbers to trail runners, skiers, kayakers and the rest of it. These are people in need of energy! And so are students.
