Soar Across Stresstember With These Rev-Your-Engines Teas
It’s not official—yet. Calendars identify Sunday, September 22—the autumn equinox, when the day enjoys equal measure of day and night— as the last day of summer.
But for those of us who work, the Tuesday after the Labor Day holiday weekend serves as the informal end of free-wheeling summer, and the start of get-back-to-business fall.
Conferences return to our lives. Business travel ramps up. Meetings proliferate. Deadlines loom, responsibilities accumulate and work takes over too much of our lives. The dinner table is no place to check email!
One of our favored strategies for navigating Stresstember? Getting as much done as possible in the morning and early afternoon. Tick the boxes on that checklist quickly! We find that when we put our heads down and fix on the biggest tasks of the day in the morning, then the rest of the day comes much easier. Our sleep improves, too. And we savor every minute around the dinner table—without any phone interruptions.
To turn mornings into spectacles of productivity, energy is essential.
Enter tea.
For us, tea offers an especially complementary range of energy-boosting attributes. Traditional Camellia sinensis contains caffeine, which of course famously gets the juices flowing. But traditional tea also contains a diversity of other beneficial botanical compounds. And with tea blends incorporating botanicals from other plants, energy advantages from tea sipping grow even more profound.
To help you kick off the return to work, we suggest a trio of teas that will invest your mornings with enough zip to carry you through the morning and early afternoon. Just in time, in fact, to polish off that list of things to do for the day, and unwind.
Teas for Work Energy: Firefly Chai
Putting zip in your step is about more than caffeine. Spices, too, awaken the senses and help bring about mental clarity along with renewed vigor. As a result, different chai blends stand as ideal partners for morning get-up-and-go. Our house-blended Firefly Chai begins with black tea—a standard base ingredient for most traditional chais. It’s this base that provides the caffeine. And then we layer ginger root, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom nutmeg and vanilla into the arresting blend. This morning wake-up call will start the day with a boost. Sipping it across the morning and into the afternoon will keep the happy buzz rolling.
Teas for Work Energy: Black Dragon Pearl
As tea fanatics, we gravitate toward traditional Camellis sinensis teas. The leaves and buds from this plant convey a wealth of flavors, textures and aromas—even though any version of Camellia sinensis, from a Japanese sencha to a Chinese oolong or Indian assam, is the same plant. It’s the terroir—the soil, climate and overall environment—that has shaped tea for millennia, causing different varieties to form and flourish. On top of that, cultural practices including time of harvest and methods for controlling fermentation, also contribute toward tea’s glorious culinary distinctions. For a straight traditional tea, consider our Black Dragon Pearl, a unique tea from China’s rural, mountainous and beautiful Yunnan Province. Tea farmers handpick these leaves and roll them into pearl shapes. The result? A smooth tea that broadcasts malt, cacao and spice notes. Even without the addition of chai ingredients such as cinnamon or ginger, this tea broadcasts spice.
Teas for Work Energy: CHA Awake
This custom blend, the fruit of a partnership between Ku Cha and the University of Colorado’s Center for Humanities and the Arts, leverages two traditional styles of Camellia sinensis—black tea from Yunnan Province and organic ripe puerh. Both of them offer powerful flavors, but the puerh also adds additional health benefits. As a fermented tea—one of the only in the world, and by far the most prominent—puerh can help improve digestion. People across China sip puerh to bolster health in different ways, from mitigating cholesterol to detoxification and weight loss. It also delivers complex flavors to the brew, with notes of qualities like forest floor and mushroom. To these outstanding foundations, we add organic orange peel and organic cinnamon, which enliven senses and help improve wakefulness and clarity.
