This time of year, I love to build new Holiday Teas. Creating a new tea can be fun, creative, exciting and cool. It seems so easy, doesn’t it? Just throw some tea together, steep it and voila!
Creating new tea blends can sometimes be rather difficult, stressful, costly and challenging. Some of our specialty tea blends, for example, can take days of testing and tasting. I often will be in the process of making a tea, but end up being forced to take a break, walk away and cleanse my palate. Then I’ll return another day with a clean palate and fresh ideas.
I have been working on 2 new blends to add to our signature Stonehouse holiday lineup—which brings us to 14 for this season!
Blue Christmas has hit the shelf. It’s a Blueberry, Earl Grey blend that is low caffeine and perfect with a splash of milk.
The second tea is still in the creation stage, as it’s been a little more challenging. It has a green tea base and I’ve decided to build on the idea of a Christmas Orange. The process this far, has including a lot of tasting, yet I still haven’t found the perfect flavour.
Here are a few of the key aspects I have to consider when I’m making a new blend:
Steeping time
I often combine types of tea and those different types require different steeping times. If you’ve ever over steeped your tea, you know that it can actually taste quite bitter. If you under steep your tea, the tea simply lacks flavour.
Tannins
Tannins are the sharp, bitter, astringent and dry taste that you can experience from some teas. Too much tannin is hard to fix once it’s embedded within a tea.
Balance
Truly understanding each ingredient is an important part of the process, and choosing what flavours to add that can create sweetness, spice and depth. It’s important to me that we create teas that have layers of flavour so they don’t fall flat when someone takes a sip.
To be honest, some of the best blends that we have, were developed with what I thought was a mistake. Some combination of flavours I wouldn’t have thought would work but end up being great together. Like Bob Ross says, “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.”
Being a Chef, a lot of our tea recipes are really built around creativity first. I love taking the skills I have from making food and recipes and instead creating a tea blend.
Some people have asked if I am a Tea Sommelier? Did I go to school to learn tea? Am I a tea specialist? The truth is, I know flavours. I understand ratios. I have a strong palette. I guess you can call me a “Flavour Creator!”
As we head into the season of unique Stonehouse tea blends, know that each one of these blends was created and built with a lot of time, tasting and love.
I think it is time for tea!
Cheers,
Christine