Best Tea and Honey 
Blooming Mountains of Tea!
The Ta Hua Bloom is shaped like an ancient ziggurat!
We’ve earlier written abut the Blooming Tea phenomenon. Blooming Teas are little balls or pellets of woven green tea leaves. When immersed into hot water, they slowly unravel! As they expand, they reveal beautiful flowers like the amaranth or jasmine, and form themselves into incredible shapes. The base of green tea leaves are from premium harvests, and the floral aromas and flavors of the decorative flowers add an incomparable sweetness to the brew. We’ve recently discovered the Ta Hua Blooming Tea at our host’s web pages, here! The Ta Hua Bloom is woven to resemble the shape of a mountain topped with a Buddhist temple. The AMaranth blossom releases a wonderful flavor into the brew. Visit Red Leaf Tea today and try this beauty!
The Chamomint Toddy!
Chamomint Tea makes a great brandy toddy!
We’re always on the lookout for new recipes for both teas and cocktails, and here is one that combines the best of both worlds. The tea in question is the Chamomint Tea here, offered by our host, Red Leaf Tea. The Chamomint Toddy is created by heating a cup of apple juice to a low simmer (about two minutes in a microwave). Then you step the tea in the juice, adding a sprinkle of cinnamon at the same time. For a perfect nightcap, a single shot of a nice brandy makes the perfect toddy. Apple and chamomile are very similar in flavor, and the cinnamon, mint and brandy produce a fantastic and zesty sweetness in the brew!
A Cup of Beauty!
Social teas are great occasions for sharing beautiful beverages in an elegant setting. The traditional English tea set was created to make these events as uplifting and pleasurable as possible. Inspired by England’s example, our host, Red Leaf Tea, has created this new collection of Decorated Flowering Teacups! With their brightly tinted images of unfolding roses, these teacups will bring a real beauty to your services, and at a great price! A perfect gift for your friends or family, the Red Leaf Tea set will help you create a companionable and stylish afternoon event every time! The Set is also currently offered at four teacups for the price of three, a great bargain.
More Exotics: Japan’s Mu Tea # 16
As one might expect of the country that gave the world the tea ceremony, tea is a serious business in Japan, and it is not unusual for Japanese tea manufacturers to hire tea designers to assemble new and intriguing blends. In this case, George Osaka gets the credits for inventing Mu Tea #16! Our host, Red Leaf Tea, now features Japanese Mu Tea #16 among it’s more exotic offerings. This brew is a tisane, meaning that it has no true tea leaves in it, but is instead a blend of herbs, leaves and roots of other plants. With a strong resemblance to a mild and curried apple tea, dominated by a ginseng flavor, Mu Tea #16 is very different from the green and black tea most of us enjoy. It will serve best as an appertif, or as an accompaniment with a main course of Oriental food. Buy some here, for an exotic change of pace!
The Best In Irish Tea
Irish Tea is well known a a wake-me-up brew. In the 1600′s, the first teas to come out of China were usually black, because they were easier to ship, due to their long shelf life. Black teas soon became the basic brew known to Europeans. In the 1800′s, India emerged as a tea growing force, and blends of leaves became popular.The Irish Breakfast tea was soon developed the classic Irish Breakfast Tea as a strong, sweet and highly caffeinated brew (though English importers created the blend, they were rather snottily referring to the brew’s ability to to cure the hangovers of Irish stereotypes). Our host, Red Leaf Tea, has always found it advantageous to keep a large stock of this Irish Breakfast Xtra Fancy blend on hand! Popular, sweet, and durable, this basic black suits all breakfasts, hungover or not!
Handcrafted Tea From Fujian, Yunan
Golden Star Tea is handwoven from white tea leaves
We recently discovered a wonderful new version of white tea! Harvested by hand in the famous forests of wild tea trees, in both Fujian and Yunan provinces of China, these white and green tea leaves are woven into little shapes. Our favorite version is the Golden Star, though there are also Golden Dragon Feelers, Wheat Heads and Earrings available! The Golden Stars do not unravel during steeping, but other types do. These Handcrafted Teas are very hard to find, and we recommend you quickly contact our host, Red Leaf Tea, and make your purchase soon. There is a nice variety in the flavor of these brands, with the freshly harvested wild leaves providing a unique delicacy to the brew.
Welcome to Tea World!
Try the Tea 4 One Sampler from Red Leaf Tea
If you’re curious about the world of loose-leaf tea, freshly imported form tropical lands (and not beaten into tea dust suitable for teabags), with all their nutrients and inherent virtues still alive and kicking, then you should order this gift package! Composed of several great tea accessories and gourmet loose-leaf teas, this set is available at a bargain price from our host, Red Leaf Tea. We especially like the very bright colors of the Blooming Tea, a hand-crafted beauty that unfurls a sweet flower as it steeps in hot water. Another standout of this group is the Black Night tea, a simple black tea taken to a dark extreme, giving it a very rosy flavor! This is a great way for new tea tasters to learn more about this fantastic beverage.
Bamboo and Tea
If you enjoy brewing loose-leaf tea, then you’ve almost certainly had the problem of of poor filters that allow tea leaves to float in the liquor, and then to get stuck in your teeth! And perhaps you find the antiseptic metal and paper filter commonly available in modern supermarkets not quite to your satisfaction. You will probably love the solution that Chinese villagers of old came up with for this problem! The bamboo tree, which even today provides these simple farmers with shoots and leaves for food and amazingly strong stalks for building materials, also serves as a source of fine tea strainers! A few bamboo fibers carefully woven together create this organic and flavorless device. It attracts floating leaves like a magnet, and it can be found at a bargain price at our host’s website, Red Leaf Tea. We hope you try it today!
The Kalahari Herb: Rooibus Tea
Kalahari Rooibus blends cornflower and marigold with the African tea
Technically speaking, the tea tree produces the only true tea, while all other beverages made of brewed leaves and roots are “tisanes.” Despite this fussy nomenclature, rooibus tea has definitely conquered the tea market in the United States during the last decade! A product of South African scrubland and desert, the rooibus is a small shrub. The Dutch colonist of the area, who became the Afrikaaners, noted that the local Zulu and Watusi peoples valued the rooibus (which simply means “red bush” in Afrikaans!) for the tea made from its dried leaves. The rooibus could alleviate high blood pressure, and the liquor was good for the skin. So the plant was adopted by the colonists for their own. The Zulu people helped growers gather the tiny seeds of the shrub for commercial cultivation in the 1930′s, and and today the entire world has discovered the sweet, nutty flavors of rooibus tea!
The Mountain Town of Darjeeling
Darjeeling from the spring harvest brews this golden liquor
In the Lower Himalaya mountains there is a town called Darjeeling, which today produces a tremendous supply of supremely spicy and rich black teas to the world. Darjeeling was a simple village until the British arrived in the 1830′s, when they built a depot there. A Dr. Charles Campbell also arrived, bringing with him a supply of seeds from the small-leafed variety of the tea tree (many Chinese sources consider this a theft on par with the Brinks Robbery!). An inverterate tea lover, he realized that the high altitude and rich soil of the area would be perfect for tea plants. At his direction, the plant was cultivated and these tea trees produced a brew of unique flavor and spiciness, called “muscatel” in the industry. Today, the tea plantations (or gardens) of Darjeeling produce over 10,000 tons of black tea annually (growers have recently begun to work more with green and white teas). Much as champagne is rigidly protected by the government of France, these are carefully labeled by the Tea Board of India, so look for a certification on the packaging and accept no substitutes!