Best Tea and Honey 
Flavored Honey for Fun
Macadamia Blossoms add a buttery flavor to honey!
At Red Leaf Tea, our host site and online store, we have a lot of great honey’s available, including a honey made near tremendous fields of macadamia nut trees, right here. These blossoms give the honey a buttery flavor. Honey is mostly sugar, of course, and the palate can easily be overwhelmed by the sweet gooeyness of its taste. As a way of educating your palate, and for a little fun with the family, you might try a taste test for several honeys! Buy a plain honey and two flavored honeys. pour a little from each onto a saucer and provide several spoons for your tasters, making sure that they don’t see which honey goes onto which saucer! Orange blossom and blueberry blossom honey have distinct flavors and are fairly easy to find in supermarkets. When the tasting begins, write down the results and see if there is a gourmet in the house!
Teas and Caffeine
White tea, like these "Snow Bud" leaves, have more caffeine than other teas
We all know that a good cup of tea will perk you up. This is due to the presence of caffeine, a stimulant that occurs naturally in the leaves of Camilla Sinensis, the tea plant. Tea leaves, in fact, have more caffeine than the seeds of the coffee plant! The preparation of the two brews, however, ends up draining most of the caffeine out of tea, while coffee beans processed into espresso are famous for their “jolt.” Of the varieties of tea, white tea is perhaps the most strongly caffeinated, though the bitterness of the drug is hidden by the dominant earthy flavor of the premium tea. Green tea and black tea are lightly caffeinated. Of all the herbs, yerba mate is perhaps the most caffeinated. Rooibus tea from South Africa has no caffeine at all. For more information of caffeination, try checking some of our notes on all the different and exotic teas we have available at our website, Red Leaf Tea!
Which to Choose? Green or Black?
A quintet of premium tea flavors for all occasions!
When you enjoy a dinner at a Japanese restaurant, you will almost certainly enjoy a cup of green tea, such as these, at the start of the meal. With it ability to improve digestion and its mellow blend of grassy and earthy flavor notes, green tea certainly is perfect for a meal of lightly sauced and accented food. Black tea, on the other hand, is rosy and floral in flavor, like the ones here at our online store, Red Leaf Tea. It can stand up to much stronger mixes of food, including salty and sugary flavors. The English knew what they were doing when they created the afternoon tea. The meal is generally served with a small sandwich or pastry, and the sugar-coated confections and cold meats stand up well to the flavors of the brew. Heavy breakfasts of eggs and other Western fare also can blend in well with tea. Keep this in mind when choosing a tea (or a wine) for a meal – delicate teas for delicate foods, strong teas for strong flavors. Get the best of both worlds with the European Sampler, a combined package of black and green teas offered here at our Red Leaf store!
We’re Sticklers for Honey!
If you have a kid who gets fussy about their food, this is a bit of honey you can employ to great effect, in tea and many other consumables! Our host, Red Leaf Tea, now offers these Honey Sticks on their website, here. The idea is perfectly simple, and like many simple ideas, it works beautifully. Honey Sticks are tough litte plastic packages, each one containing five grams of honey, U.S. grade A. Simply snip off the end of the packet, tip over yout drink, or your pancakes, or whatever you are serving, and slowly squeeze the honey out. Kids will love watching the drip, drip, drip of the sugary goo, and there is no mess involved! Try some today!
A Wild Marsala Tea
If you enjoy exotic flavors, this tea is for you! Our hosts, Red Leaf Tea, have found this zesty and stimulating Wild Monkey Marsala imported from China (and available online here). Starting with a basic Chinese black tea and adding a few light spices such as cinnamon and allspice, the blend is then infused with a good dose of marsala wine. While wine infused teas are often interesting and delicate, this one may have you wondering if the crafters have gone a bit overboard! Have no fear! The marsala is properly in the background of the flavor, although the wine makes the leave’s aroma amazingly complex. The brew can take a bit of cream, but do NOT add lemon! For a terrific and spicy brew, try the Wild Monkey!
Organic Tea, Arise!
A fine flavored organic tea, Turkish Green Apple
If you’ve followed the food news in the U.S., you’ve probably seen a lot of nasty reports lately. McDonald’s food was shown to be a virtual poison in the documentary, “Supersize Me,” from Morgan Spurlock. Serious and noisy publications describing the wretched details of mass-produced foods, such as “The End of Food,” by Thomas Pawlick, have awakened a sleeping audience of consumers. The basic message from all these reports? Buy organic! Luckily for tea lovers, tea, like wine and coffee, is a craft product, usually not produced at the volume that attracts superfood corporations like Monsanto. Our host, Red Leaf Tea, now offers several organically grown teas on it’s Organic Tea page, here. Between our Earl Grey Organic and Turkish Green Apple teas, we’re sure we offer you the best organic flavors anywhere!
A delicate balance…
Sicilian Vespers, one of the finest blended white teas in the world!
We are always eager to enjoy a new white tea, and our host, Red Leaf Tea, has brought a great new brand to the market. This new blended flavor is called the Sicilian Vespers, a great mix of white tea with floral sweeteners and a cabernet wine infusion. The delicate white leaf successfully retains is flavor in this blend, while the rich and robust flavor of the cabernet is modulated to accent rather than overwhelm the brew. Sicilian Vespers are also sweetened with a mixture of chrysanthemum and osmanthus. These blossoms are strongly flavored, but the measured balance of this tea is fine enough to incorporate the aroma and sugar. We can confidently recommend it for afternoons or mornings!