TeaBlogger

As quoted at the Tea Stop:

tea leaves
tea loves
loves tea
lives tea
leaves tea?
never.
~ Uniek Swain

Byoo-tea-ful! Hurray for Valentine’s Day!

Some interesting teas for Valentine’s Day, by the tone of the event :

• Lemon Ginger Tea – For an independent Valentine, celebrating singledom! Invigorating as well as exciting.
• Twinings English Breakfast – Warm, comforting… classic. For well-established romances.
• Celestial Seasonings Raspberry Gardens – Green tea that’s both mellow and tart… for those bittersweet situations.
• A nice, steamy Oregon Chai – For creamy, dreamy love, and cuddling on the couch.

Also, some Valentine’s history, as well as a recipe for Love Potion Tea. Cheers, to all! Tip back a good cup of tea in honor of the wonders of love!

There’s nothing so classic for Valentine’s Day as flowers and candy, preferably chocolate. But sometimes classic can be boring, whether it’s a dozen roses or your millionth cup of Earl Grey. With that in mind, here’s a few interesting-looking twists on the traditional old Valentine’s Day gifts, especially suited to tea lovers and those who adore them:

• Green Tea Dark Chocolate – If the chocolate is as nice as the packaging, I’ll love it. Seems like a reasonable price too!
• Torn Ranch also has Tea Infused Chocolate Indulgences, with flavors like Masala Chai and Jasmine Green… Intriguing!

• Flowering teas! I don’t know whether these various videos makes flowering teas look awesome or terrifying, but some flowering teas can be truly lovely.
• This beauty from Adagio (who refers to them as ‘display teas’) looks gorgeous!
• And there’s also quite a selection at Mountain Rose Herbs.

Besides their beauty, the nicest thing about flowering teas is that they are really easy to try. Steeping is nearly the same to any other tea, and all you need is a glass teapot so you can watch the magic. Numi has some instructions for brewing teas, including flowering teas, but all you really need to know is:

1. Without a strainer, place your tea flower in your glass teapot.
2. Boil water. Pour over.
3. Watch & Enjoy.

Like many teas, many flowering teas have a brewing time of 2 – 3 minutes, but they can also be reused. Can silly old roses work magic like this?

Romantically inspired haikus and poems leading up to Valentine’s Day….

pure is my love of
you. pure as the elixir
that your sweet lips sip.

The Taste of Tea revolves around an eccentric family and their struggles with life, and looks quite beautiful as well. It also looks like a crowd-pleaser, from these reviews. This article sums it up well…

“…a description someone gives of a song involved in one of the film’s many detours neatly summarizes the movie itself: ‘It’s more cool than weird, and it stays in your head.’”

To the top of the queue it goes! =)

I’ve never been much for honey, but since I recieved a TON of it for Christmas, it’s time to experiment. This is when I realized that since I’d rarely tried honey, I had no idea what to pair it with!

My first attempt was a Stash Decaf Earl Grey from their delightful tea chest, with a squirt of not-so-real lemon juice from my fridge. I also had no idea how much honey to go with, but I ended up settling on about three spoons from this awesomely cute honey spoon, also from Stash. (My dad went to town on their catalogue!) I ended up with a refreshing drink that was the tiniest bit sweet, but mostly focused on the bergamot and lemon. And it was wonderful!

Gives me hope for more honey experiments in the future….

The good folks at Adagio Teas that brought us all many great tea websites like TeaMap and TeaChef have a new site: TeaCritic, which seems to be a collection of feeds of blogs about tea. Maybe we’ll join? Should be interesting to see how it unfolds, either way!

soothe me – a warm purr
calm me – like an autumn wind
ease away the world

you know what really does it for me in the summer? iced black tea with a spring of mint and a dash of grapefruit. yum – now that’s refreshing.

What is it that makes a good cup of tea? To me it’s several things:

1. The better the tea, the better the cup. Although I love them all….
2. It’s got to be not too weak, but not too strong. I often err on the side of too strong, though. Check out the TeaTimer, if you forget about your brewing like me.
3. Just the right amount of sweetness: 2 sugar cubes or half a Sweet N Low.
4. If it’s hot and black… a dash (or much more!) of milk. Cream will do, but it’s nothing compared to milk.

the sweet taste of tea
simple and obvious as
breathing. sighing. life.