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Blue just fits the mood tonight. This packet is getting a little old and tired. That fits, too :)
All the same, there’s still enough lemon in the lemongrass and berry in the dried blueberries they can both be identified, and it’s colorful and calming. As I mentioned in previous reviews, I’m also grateful for the omission of hibiscus.

Time to finish appreciating it or take a big batch to my Sunday kiddos for Christmas tea-and-cocoa day.

Took the rest of this week off for mental health and a little R&R, and I had been saving the inaugural cup of these adorable little golden curls for a morning when I had a little extra time to enjoy them.

The rye bread scent was delicious from the moment the water first hit the cup. I pulled the steeping basket out of the mug, stepped away from the kitchen for a minute, and before I could get back, the scent had already captured my husband, he sneaked a couple of sips, and had already pronounced it delicious. That’s sayin’ something.

Crusty, wheaty, maybe a little bit of burnt caramel…it’s fine stuff.

Lexia Aleah kindly shared this Beantown chai with me some time ago and I have inadvertently neglected it. However, with a welcome cold snap and two delicious days of drought-breaking rain, I have been on a chai kick.

The base tea reminds me of my beloved PG Tips—tiny little CTC nuggets that steep up strong: enough so that I had to abandon my intention to drink it straight and a little extra water and sugar.

I’m getting gentle hints of all the spices mentioned in the product description—sometimes when sharing small, mailable packets, it’s hard to fit in a representative sample of all the extra non-tea goodies. But I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. Fresh out of the tin, this is no doubt a straight-up, well-balanced, classic chai.

One of our favorite Saturday mini-trips is to the heart of Jasper County, Missouri—drive past Kellogg Lake, Roffman’s Pumpkin Farm, and a couple dozen pastures, and you’ll eventually hit the Circle E Market—the area Walmart, so to speak, for our Amish and Mennonite neighbors. Home-grown produce, deli sandwiches with slabs of fresh bread, black stockings, wide striped elastic to shore up your suspenders, turnovers so good they’ll make you cry (especially when you wait to go until the afternoon like we did and they were out)…

…and tea! This was a happy new discovery in their bulk grocery section, and when I saw “carrot cake” I grabbed the bag instantly. Big ol’ hunks of fruit and carrot and white chocolate chips.

It’s pretty much as tasty as it looks. As always, I didn’t read the label and underleafed a little—they recommend 1.5 tsp to 8 ounces water; even so, every element of a good Sunday-church-potluck carrot cake is generously and accurately represented.

The bulk groceries at Circle E are wholesaler bar-coded and privately labeled with the store’s logo, but I’d sure love to know the provenance of this blend. I can’t wait to do a better cup with more leaf next time.

I think it was Michelle that suggested combining Morning Thunder with another black tea to minimize the mate whang and and maximize the mate bang. Thus, after an inconvenient wake-up at 4:30 (no emergency; just husband and cats acting like it was daylight), I have a tumbler of Morning Thunder/Tazo Awake steeped to a lethal consistency close to hand. Results? Judging from the number of zone-outs so far this morning, I may just need to dunk my head in ice water ;)

Well, cold and flu season is upon us — one of the three in our household is significantly under the weather, one is sniffling, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to follow suit. So I’m spraying, sanitizing, and Cloroxing like a woman obsessed, and following up with all things immunity-boostish.

So I’m glad I still have a few bags of this Immune Support variety on hand. It’s got ginger, turmeric, and black pepper to clean out whatever clogs you; creates a pleasant little throat burn on the way down. I wish they had tweaked it to be just a touch more lemony, though, to camouflage the mild metallic tang that must be the added zinc and/or supplemental Vitamin C.

I found this box at a Big Lots, which is often the last stop before a product is discontinued, but it looks like the TeaWell series is still readily available from Celestial Seasonings.

I don’t choose chai unless it’s freezing. It is. A balmy 32 F outside today thanks to a two-day freezer express from the Great North. (Thanks, Canada friends—it feels great! Now, at least. I will ask you to take it back in January.)

This chai variety smells like a pack of Big Red or Beeman’s Clove chewing gum in the pouch. Straight up at a five minute steep (my little drawstring filter bags are kind of thick, so they take more time than the seller’s recommendation), it leads with cinnamon and clove, but you don’t have to strain too hard to catch some orange essence.

Reminds me of an upscale version of Constant Comment, with the added benefit of not getting bitter when it cools—sometimes CC wants you to comment very quickly. A nicely done departure from the chai-dentical stuff that comes out this time of year.

The addition of milk turns this into a slightly less sweet take on caramel corn minus the corniness, although the butter flavor is very mildly salty, which fits the theme. Tasty and different!

I absolutely love chocolate and orange together—my mother-in-law and I share a propensity to snarf boxfuls of those chocolate-orange jelly sticks without realizing how much we’ve just decimated.

However, the notion of chocolate and grapefruit never crossed my mind until we saw and sniffed this blend at the savoy shop. Straight off the steep, the grapefruit hits you first; however, after it cools, you realize there’s a really fine chocolate base underneath. The problem is leaving enough in the cup to allow some to cool. Good stuff.

Sometimes adding milk pushes a certain element of a tea to the forefront. In this case, it is just sweet and scotchy with milk. Still quite tasty, but every bit as good straight up.