Blends
Blends are what you get when you mix tea leaves with other tea styles, or with other ingredients and flavorings. Common examples are masala chai, Earl Grey, or English Breakfast.
This is a subcategory of Styles, which explores the diversity of tea styles and varieties.
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Earl Grey vs Black Tea
I see these questions all the time: What’s the difference between Earl Grey and black tea? How much caffeine is in Earl Grey? What are the health benefits of Earl Grey compared to black tea? Well, strap in and let’s see if I can cover it all in one article!
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Making traditional masala chai at home
I would never presume to tell you the RIGHT way to make a cup of tea. As I’ve mentioned so many times before, there is no single right way to do it. In this post, however, I will talk about one of the TRADITIONAL ways to make masala chai.
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Tea blends you can’t put in a bag
When I’m having fun with tea blends at home (or in my case, at the tea bar), I’m often faced with a conundrum. I want to combine significantly different teas, but they require different steep times or water temperatures — or sometimes both. How can you steep that blend?
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Fun Blends: Terracotta Army Chocolate Pu–erh
Oh, how I love having fun with blends and logos. This one started out as a custom blend for my wife, Kathy. She is a chocoholic who loves tea. She doesn’t like chocolate tea blends using mild-flavored tea. She likes to be able to taste the chocolate and the tea.
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Fun Blends: Fifty Shades of Earl Grey
At the height of popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey books, I was designing Earl Grey recipes, and thought it would be fun to do a Fifty Shades parody. I didn’t think it would earn a permanent spot on our menu, but it became one of our top sellers.
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Old familiar blends vs. creative house blends
It’s a dilemma for anyone who owns or manages a tearoom: how many different teas shall I carry and how many of them should be funky house blends versus the traditional stuff everyone else carries?
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Fun Blends: Coyotes of the Purple Sage
With new tea blends, sometimes we come up with the blend first and struggle to think of the perfect name. Sometimes we come up with a cool tea name and work on a blend that matches. And then we do the logo. Sometimes, however, everything comes together in a flash.
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The Lady Greystoke logo
Does it seem like I’ve got a theme going lately? I’ve had quite a few posts about the fun we’ve been having with logos for our house blends. Now, the latest in the series: Doug Bailey (Suzanna’s husband) made us a logo for our Lady Greystoke tea.
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Fun Blends: MaterniTEA for Morning Sickness
I am not trained in the healing powers of herbs, but I know what people ask for at the tea bar. We seem to have a lot of pregnant women in town these days, and most of them come in requesting either ginger or mint for their morning sickness.
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Yet another new logo: Mr. Excellent’s Post-Apocalyptic Earl Grey
Such a delay! It was about eight months ago that I came up with the Mr. Excellent’s Post-Apocalyptic Earl Grey Tea blend (see my blog post about it here), and we finally have a logo for it! This one was drawn by my daughter’s friend from college, Brandon Pope. I’ve found that logo art comes
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Lady Greystoke
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, we decided to rename our Lady Grey tea. I put the word out to friends on all of the social media, and a former fellow moderator at the Straight Dope Message Boards who goes by the moniker of “Czarcasm” came up with the winning suggestion: Lady Greystoke.
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Lady Grey
Today was tea blending day at the tea bar, as I mixed up new batches of our house blends. As I was working on our Lady Grey, I got to thinking about how incredibly different Lady Grey teas are from one company to the next, and decided to do a bit of reading on the
Tea With Gary 