Three Teas to Get the Creative Juices Flowing
Sometimes you wake up and understand the day ahead is packed with creative pursuits. Maybe you’re a writer, and the hours will be devoted to words. Perhaps the garden calls, and you know you’ll be kneeling in soil, your hands covered with dirt, your ideas about botanical color, shape and aroma finding purchase as you dig holes and submerge roots.
No matter the artistic pursuit, we have the perfect beverage accompaniment to your dawn-’til-dusk charge of creativity: tea.
Tea’s synergies with mental activities are long-established. Soon after people began brewing and sipping tea, in China, scholars became its biggest consumers. Ever since, tea-drinking and creativity have been linked.
The caffeine clearly plays an important role. The plant compound is stimulating. But sipping caffeine for the sake of mental clarity walks a fine line between helpful and hurdle. Too much caffeine, and the mind grows scattered; instead of clear thoughts, they grow fuzzy.
That’s why we think tea is the ideal beverage for creative work. The caffeine is subtle, compared to coffee and energy drinks. Slowly savoring tea across a day doesn’t send the mind into hyperactive overdrive. Instead, you can maintain a healthy state of mental clarity and creative energy.
But caffeine is not essential, as you’ll see with one of our spotlighted teas.
Cheers to artists and creative work! We know you will enjoy these teas as you work on that gorgeous painting of the Flatirons.
Teas for Creativity: Jasmine Silver Needle
We are particularly fond of white tea for day-long creative pursuits. White tea is lightly oxidized, and easy to sip for hours. We especially champion our Jasmine Silver Needle. For this tea, farmers harvest premium silver needle tea and then spend as many as six evenings harvesting fresh jasmine blossoms and incorporating them into the harvested tea. Once it’s ready, the flowers’ perfume has permeated the tea leaves. Jasmine Silver Needle is regarded as the king of all jasmine teas. Brew and pour this treat while you are taking breaks between your sewing project — you’ll thrill to every sip.
Teas for Creativity: Sakura Cherry
This is such a special tea. It’s so revelatory that we turned to Sakura Cherry for one of our ready-to-drink canned teas. As we only canned four of our teas, and we carry more than 200, that’s quite an honor!
Japanese sencha serves as the base of Sakura Cherry. Sencha is the most popular tea in Japan — not matcha. Where matcha is powdered, Sencha is just whole leaves. Like many Japanese teas, farmers use steam to arrest oxidation. The result, with sencha, is a tea with pronounced grassy flavors – it’s even got subtle hints of seaweed, in an excellent way.
We think Sakura Cherry is an excellent tea to drink for its nudges of caffeine and its superb flavor — cherry blossoms and pieces, hibiscus and rosehips are incorporated into the base tea. But we also think this tea is appropriate for artistic pursuits because of the cherry blossoms.
Sakura means “cherry blossoms” in English. The beautiful flowers are one of the most prominent symbols of Japan, symbolizing the transient nature of life. Cherry blossoms bloom all at once for short periods of time across the island nation. Once they are spent, the blossoms drift to the ground turning the ground pink.
Artists wrestle with many things, but the transience of life has always been an important topic. Why not drink a tea honoring sakura while adding the last leg to that dining room table you’ve been crafting in the garage for a few months?
Teas for Creativity: Rooibos Creamsicle
You’ve been leaning on your imagination for many hours. It’s time for a different kind of tea, something without caffeine (it’s getting late) and offering hints of sweet.
In other words, Rooibos Creamsicle is calling.
This tea rests on a foundation of rooibos, a South African shrub that contains myriad electrolytes and other minerals (and no caffeine). The electrolytes and minerals give the body fresh infusions of pep and satisfaction; athletes guzzle electrolyte-satured drinks like Gatorade because of the electrolytes. While working on a collage is not physically taxing — it’s not trudge up a 14er — it does drain resources from the brain. Electrolytes are just what the noggin’ needs to finish that collage.
Rooibos Creamsicle’s advantages expand beyond the health properties of rooibos, however. It also contains orange peel, a little sugar and dehydrated yogurt. One sip, and you’re brought back to the pleasures of a cold Creamsicle. The Creamsicle reverie serves as inspiration — precisely what you desire after hours working your way through an artistic project.
Make sure to put aside time now and again for extended focus upon creative work. And before beginning that day of throwing pots, pick up these three teas to improve your mental clarity and provide inspiration across the day.
