California Sunshine

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Tea of the Week for January 25, 2016!

Even though I currently live in the Pacific Northwest (and I love it here and really don’t want to live anywhere else) there’s a part of me that will always be a California girl. I was born there and I lived there for a number of years in my adulthood. The best part about California? That sunshine! And while I’d never want to live there again, there are times – like now when it’s wet and rainy and cold here – that I miss California and that sunshine just a little bit.

So I created a tea to remind me of what I like best about California – the sun and the yummy citrus fruit that the sunshine provides.

For the base of this tea, I used a very special Thyolo OP1 green tea from the Satemwa estate in Malawi. These leaves are huge and gorgeous! They also have a natural citrus-y tone to them so I decided that grapefruit was an obvious choice to use as a flavoring for this tea. But as I was creating what was going to be a straightforward grapefruit-y tea, I decided that wasn’t good enough so I got out some of the other citrus-y flavors in my “palette” – I grabbed orange, lime, lemon and blended those flavors with grapefruit to create a bright, tangy, citrus-y tea. YUM!

It’s like laying out on a California beach but without the worry of getting skin cancer.

ingredients: single estate OP1 green tea, grapefruit segments, orange segments, lime segments, lemon segments and all-natural flavors

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Yeah, I know that the tea doesn’t look like a green tea. Quite a few times during the blending and packaging process, I found myself questioning whether this was a green tea or a black tea because the leaves look like an OP1 Black tea. But this IS a single garden OP1 green tea from the Satemwa estate in Malawi. When I first sampled this tea in it’s pure form (unflavored), I noticed a distinct citrus-y note to the leaves and that’s why I thought that it seemed a natural fit to use it to create this California Sunshine tea which highlights the citrus flavors of grapefruit, orange, lime and lemon.

The flavor is BRIGHT and beautifully citrus-y. It reminds me of sunny Southern California where I was born and it’s the perfect tea to sip on days like this – it’s cold and wet here in the Pacific Northwest and I could use just a little bit of California sunshine but since I don’t really like the traffic, the smog, the crime and the crowds of sunny SoCal, I think that it’s a much better idea to just sip on this tea!

To brew: these leaves are so big and wiry and difficult to measure using a teaspoon or bamboo scoop, so I eyeballed the measurement to something that looked something like a bamboo scoop’s worth of tea. Into the basket of the Kati it goes and then I add 12 ounces of water heated to 180°F and steeped it for 2 minutes. The resteep is really nice with this blend too – these leaves are slow to unfurl!