Seasonal Tea Drinking

It amazes me every year that as soon as the temperatures cool even the littlest bit people suddenly start buying more tea. I know that tea drinkers don’t just stop drinking tea but usually switch to iced during the warmer months and we do see an increase in sales for the teas that makes great iced teas but not enough to make up for the lack of sales on the normal winter teas. Do we just not drink as much tea in the summer? Or do we fall back on our grocery store teas? I for one, drink as much if not more tea as iced tea in the summer than I do hot tea in the winter. I haven’t found a tea available on the store shelf that makes even a half decent cup so it makes me wonder if people really migrate from our teas to these in the summer. Can any of you tell me how your tea drinking habits change with the seasons?

Candie

New products

Wow...it's been quite a while since I posted. I'm always so involved in what I call "grunt work" to keep things going here. I know excuses, excuses!

Anyways I just put the new Tea Cozies online that came in today! I love the way they do the bottom of these, they are flat! I used to make the tea cozies we sold, mine did not have the flat bottom...so I know how much extra work goes into making these. Also I used to make a one size fits all, these fit our 3 and 6 cup teapots perfectly! The material is gorgeous, go take a peak.

We again have new tea and goodies for this week, but I'll let Candie tell you about them. I'm still working on price increases, so you still have time to order before I'm done.

What's in your cup.......Denise

UPS Faux Paux & Pricing Changes

Every year at this time we have what I like to call “pre-holiday shipping service” from UPS. About this time each year we have all kinds of lost and damaged packages. It always makes me worry about how smoothly the holiday season will go. So far the holidays always go much smoother than we expect. Well any way UPS just managed to loose a rather large shipment to us that was supposed to have arrived last week. So if you have been contacted about a backorder within the last week your order will not be able to be filled until the end of this week at the earliest. They just lost an out going order for us not more than 2 weeks ago so we will be crossing our fingers that UPS gets thing under control soon.  

I had planned to turn on all our fall specials and add our new fall teas this week but now we don’t have those teas ready to ship so look for those next week. The site theme will be changing to Autumn this week so look for the leaves to start falling.

Another big news item is that we just found out that we our biggest supplier has just implemented a price increase so we will be implementing a price increase of around 3% over next few days. I suggest you order right away to beat the rising prices.

Candie

A Delicious Mistake

Have you ever made a mistake and ended up glad that it happened? That is how we feel about the accidental creation of our Fruit Jumble Green Tea. Some of our supplier’s bags are not labeled the best and we thought we had a bag of Pear Sencha and instead had a bag of our new Watermelon Kiwi Green tea and about 2 lbs worth got mixed together. We immediately recognized the mistake by the wonderful new smell and decided to split the batch and take it home. I iced a pitcher of this new blend for some of my family and everyone was complimenting the flavor and asking what it was. Everyone who took the tea home had the same wonderful response so I decided we should name it and offer it to our customers. Fruit Jumble was born.

Candie

White Chocolate Rooibos & Red Vs. Green

Either I am finally learning to like rooibos or our new White Chocolate Rooibos is just that good. I have been struggling to like rooibos for a very long time but I think I may have finally turned the corner. Now there are two different types of rooibos red and green. Red was the first type of rooibos that become available here in the US so most of us just know it as regular rooibos. A couple of years back Green Rooibos became available and it can still be hard to find. The difference between the two is just like regular tea. The Red rooibos is left to sit and oxidize after it is chopped. The green is immediately heated and dried. I must admit that even the green has a good bit of red color to it and is not completely green colored. The red is a dark rust color. The flavor of the green rooibos is a bit like green tea but the red has a unique flavor.

Candie