Wish you a Merry Cuppa

It’s the holidays, have you noticed? Well sure, you’ve probably seen the trees surfing on the roofs of home bound vehicles. And you couldn’t have gone into any retail store without hearing some beloved (or less so) Christmas carols. You might even been flipping through channels on TV and found yourself watching an animated reindeer with a glowing red nose. Yes, it’s the holidays, and that’s a good time to drink some Christmas tea.
I’ve found two this year and highly recommend both – though for different reasons. First though, how have you incorporated tea into your holidays?

Before the 12th month of the year rolled on in, I had been looking for a tea advent calendar. Can you believe that in November I couldn't find one this side of the world? The only one that existed was from a company in Austria called Sonnentor Tea. So I got a regular chocolate calendar that doesn't have the best quality of chocolate. I've supplemented by purchasing small bags of quality chocolate that is actually meant for stocking stuffers. Anyways, for the purpose of this blog, I went and did a search for tea advent calendars. Would you believe that there are now more tea advent calendars available, including one sold in my neck of the woods? I can't quite express the rage I felt when I saw that, and saw that it was sold out. Way to advertise, you inconsiderate....ahem. I hope that in the future, David's Tea has their advent calendar listed before December. Theoretically, you could make your own tea. If you're like me, you probably have enough if you double up a few teas. But then the surprise wouldn't be there. Perhaps organize a swap between another tea enthusiast? Anyways, tea advent calendars are a excellent way to include tea into the holidays.


But what else? How about Christmas cards? When you write Christmas cards, why not stick a single tea bag inside the card? Unless your card is already tipping the scale, a teabag won't cause you to add more stamps. Of course I didn't think of this until the end of my Christmas card sending, but I think I will do it next year. Now they need to be tea bags, not loose leaf for obvious reasons. I would prefer having a sealed teabag as well. I don't know how items are processed at the post, but it is probably safer to mail sealed food.
But that's sending tea away, and we would all want to enjoy tea, right? So how about we go traditional here, and have a Holiday Tea Party? It isn't too hard, and there aren't too many rules here. Have a Christmas tea to serve, but if you can't find any, serve eggnog instead of milk. If you do wish to have a Christmas tea, buy any you see in stores, regardless of how early in the season it is. I bought some in early November, and have never seen it again. It just isn't worth it to take chances on the tea. If you are a traditional Christmas person, put out your best dishes and nice linens. If you are a character Christmas person, put out the cutesie snowman/reindeer plates and the other whimsical center pieces. Put out some baking, turn on some Christmas carols on low, and enjoy the company over a hot cup of tea.

One thing you shouldn't do, however, is invite people over for tea in your Christmas cards. The invitation isn't taken seriously, and you end up waiting for someone to get back to you. And wait and wait REALLY GUYS, I MEANT THE INVITATIONS. Why aren't you calling me?

When it comes to the actual holiday tea, there are plenty of holiday flavours to choose from. Gingerbread, eggnog, and peppermint teas are often on the grocery shelves. If you are in Trader Joe's, I'd recommend picking up their Cinnamon and Vanilla black tea. But the teas I got this year are a bit different. I like to think of them as the traditional and the character Christmas.


I'm on the shelf when it comes to Stash teas, in general. I'm not a fan of their Earl Grey (too strong of bergamot) and their awake tea isn't anything fantastical. What is delicious is their Vanilla Nut Tea, and more relevantly, their Christmas Morning tea. It has no other ingredients than tea, but as you don't put anything other than your best china for Christmas dinner, Stash has put the best into this tea. You can taste the quality, and the complexity of the tea. Which I always find surprising, because all said and done, it is really the same tea plant. This caffeinated tea is smooth, and steeps really well. It also has a nutty, almost cocoa aftertaste that I love.


My other Christmas tea is from one of my favourite tea suppliers, Murchie's. They've done Lavendar Tea, the tea served at the Empress hotel, and the summer tasting Coconut Cream Banana. I have difficulty not buying tea at Murchie's, and when I saw their Christmas Blend tea in the holiday tin, it was most certainly coming home with me. It isn't simply black tea, but blended with spices that together create the flavour of the holidays. Maybe it is the cloves and cinnamon that reminds me of baking. Or the orange peel that tastes like the season's mandarin oranges. Or the vanilla, that makes any tea super smooth.


If you do manage to invite people over for a Christmas tea, hopefully you can served them something festive. But if not, at least you are having a little tea with your holidays.

Murchie's Christmas Blend tea can be purchased in store or online. Stash's Christmas Morning tea can be purchased at your local grocery- hopefully. If you can't find it there, there is always online!

Hot tea in the tropics

The sun has finally arrived in my (cold) neck of the woods. Vancouver has simply had the coldest spring on record. Filled with rain and cold weather, it was a very depressing and discouraging season. So now that it has begun to warm up, and I can go running outside without two layers and a sweater, there is much rejoicing. But there is always a problem for me… with such warm weather, who wants to drink a hot cup of tea? It’s true that sometimes I can only have that hot cuppa early in the morning, or late into the evening (though sometimes caffeine has been known to keep me long awake.)


So would I partake in tea at the proper afternoon tea-time?
Goodness me no.

And yet……

I have heard of people who drink hot things in summer, and consume cold things in the winter. I’ve even sold ice cream bars in the dead of winter to people who are going outside to go play mini golf. They claim it is the best way to keep cool and warm, respectively. I was decidedly thinking it was a bunch of hooey, but more and more people came through swearing by it. Was it all hogwash, or did it have some merit in reality.
Perhaps there was some truth to the theory, because when you think about it the places hot beverages originate from tend to be very hot locations.

Coffee is produce in quite warm climates, and thought to originate in Ethiopia. Chocolate, and the chocolate drink that inevitable followed, were first consumed by the Mayans. Ancient Mayan pots with remnants point to Honduras as being another hot drink origin. Finally botanists suggesting tea first grew wild in Assam, India. Of course the drink was cultivated by the Chinese, and now there are the largest crops grown in India, Southern China and Sri Lanka. All of which are hot places.



So what are they doing drinking such hot beverages in these hot locations? Well I’ve read one theory that these places originally were quite rustic, and water was boiled to clear out organic contaminates. If you put your ingredients (tea leaves, coffee, or chocolate) inside to flavour the water, would you want to wait for it to cool down first? Still, I have my doubts. In some of the hottest places, the liquid would take its sweet time to cool, and would end up not cooling all that much. So, rather than decontamination, would people drink it hot to cool themselves down? Would it really work?



Theory would suggest that no, it can't. It would then suggest that yes, it can.
After hearing about the act of drinking a hot liquid on a hot day numerous of times, I decided to do a little research. There are lots of theories on why it would work – and why it wouldn't.
Some would say a cold drink is simply better, because your body puts its own heat into it.
Then I'd read hot drinks would work better because your body doesn’t have to heat the liquid up, therefore using less energy.
Cold drinks will cool you down through you core body.
Hot drinks will warm the body, to equal the heat you feel on your skin, and that would feel less intense.
The back and forth continued on.

But the best theory, the one that had some science to it, was that a hot drink heats up the core of your body. Your brain, which is hypersensitive to the temperature of your body’s core, reacts by putting the rest of your body into hyper self-cooling mode: mostly by sweating.
So the sweat helps cool your body, but it isn’t all that much better than cooling down your core via a cold drink instead.


So then, what will you do? Will you go the way of many South Americans and have their ice tea? I personally don’t like it because of the lack of sugar. The Canadian version I prefer, but to me it doesn’t even belong in the category of tea – the taste is so dissimilar. What about taking one of my hot teas with all the fixin’s and putting it into the fridge for later? Like an iced coffee? Well luckily for me I found a company willing to do that for me.


I saw this in a grocery store and had to buy it. It's made with tea extract and powdered milk.
It tastes awful.
Of course it does, and I was expecting it. But, more importantly, there was also a wrongness of the coldness. Ever distractedly drink from a mug of cold tea that you’d forgotten about while surfing the internet? It is gross and this is the same. The only tea beverage that could be cold and tasty would be Chai, and I have personally had very good frozen chai’s before.

It looks like a hot tea will be the only solution for my afternoon tea, but it can’t be just any tea. It has to be a summer inspired tea. Luckily for me, Murchie’s recently came out with a new tea called Coconut Cream Banana.

Coconut and banana are the main players, but it also has the smooth flavour of vanilla, and everything mixes so perfectly together. This doesn’t taste like artificial coconut that invades many of our baked culinary foods. It doesn’t taste like bad artificial banana you find in terrible hard candies. It tastes like you are in a hammock in the tropics, and someone just offered you a hot drink of paradise. It is by far my favourite tea I own at the moment, and I honestly had to keep from shouting “Day-O” between sips while drinking it. My mother can attest that I wasn’t always successful. My only complaint is that it is a very light tea : I have to let it steep quite a bit before it reached even a medium dark flavour and colour.



So if you are going to do something that feels completely unnatural – that is drink a hot beverage on a hot day—then at least find yourself a spectacular summer inspired tea. I obviously recommend this one, though I probably could drink Coconut Cream Banana tea on the sun and still be contented.

You can buy Murchie’s Coconut Cream Banana in store or online.
I don’t know if they will always carry it, as it could just be the fad of the season. It hasn’t gotten its own packaging yet, being sold only in bulk. Let’s hope it becomes a Murchie’s staple though.

You can find that Cold Earl Grey Boxed tea at grocery stores, though I found this one at T&T Supermarket. I don’t know why you’d want to, however.

'Empressing' the locals

One summer morning in 2004, my mother woke me up and told me we were going to go to the Victoria area on Vancouver Island for an overnight stay.
It was a glorious trip, and we spent time in all the must see places: Buchardt Gardens, the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, the Provincial Parliament building, the now gone Royal London Wax Museum, and the Royal B.C. Museum. That was actually the whole reason we were going – to see the Eternal Egypt exhibit. But most spectacular was the icon of Victoria. As the Big Ben is London, the Eiffel tower is Paris, the statue of liberty is New York, the Empress hotel is most definitely Victoria. And what else is the Empress hotel known for other than their overnight accommodations? Well, their high tea of course!

My mother and I diligently went and had tea every Monday at a local tea house. Since we were in Victoria on a Monday, we decided that high tea – even at $50 a person- was a must do. The décor was beautiful, and even though I was wearing a Harley Davidson shirt (what was I thinking?) we were treated very well. The high tea, on the other hand, was lacking. A very pricy bill got you soggy pastries, tasteless sandwiches, and very simple fair. As my mother liked to say afterwards, we weren’t “Empressed.”

What was delicious, however, was the tea. Simply called "Empress Tea," it was signature blend unique to the hotel -- of course we bought a tin of it to take home. It didn’t have any added flavours or ingredients outside of regular tea. What was special was that they blended different tea together from different regions, and even different countries. It was complex, subtle, and smooth. It is more than a little amazing that the exact same plant could taste so differently from one spot to the next. It is -the- quintessentially perfect afternoon tea.
After we got home, we savored our little tin of tea, and were sorely sad to see it finally empty. It wasn’t as if we would be going over the water anytime soon to replenish our Empress Tea stock.


But then, a few years later, I stumbled upon a delightful store called Murchie’s (the same store that I later found the lovely Lavender tea). To my surprise, and of course delight, I found that Murchie's sold the official Empress Tea blend. It turns out that the Empress (a historical hotel built in 1908) used Murchie’s (a local company established in 1894) as its tea supplier and tea blender. I promptly bought a box, and rejoiced that the Empress tea was only a wee bit of a drive away. I drank it all, bought some more, drank it all, and bought some more again. And then something odd happened. I went to buy another box of Empress Tea, but there was no such sign of the tea in the entire store of Murchie’s. I looked, became concerned, and finally flagged down a staff member to inquire about the tea. The Empress tea was no longer called the Empress tea. It is now known as Murchie’s Afternoon Blend. I grabbed the newly named tea and bought it. So relieved I was, that it didn’t occur to me to ask why – at least not until I was enjoying a cup of the brew at home. Still, no matter what the name was, I thought it the same great tea I had come to know and love.

Time passed, and my mother traveled back to Victoria and bought a package of the official tea the Empress sold (they packaged it in a box rather than a tin) for souvenir's sake. Curious,I did a taste comparison and both tea tasted the same. On examination, however, the tea leaves were a little larger than my Murchie’s blend. It was visually different, but still the exact same blend of tea. Eventually we had once again run out of our dear tea, and once again the tiny pilgrimage was made to pick up Murchie’s afternoon blend. This time however, I was determined to ask some questions. To appreciate the answers, however, it's best to know a little bit about the Empress hotel:

It was built a bloomin’ long time ago, and through most of its existence was owned by CPR. Canadian Pacific Railway was doing well, and building hotels for the guests that used its rail. Yes, the railroad didn’t extend to Victoria, but they also had nice ships (not unlike ferries, but also not unlike little floating hotels either) that would transport people to Seattle, Alaska, ect. Business boomed, then wilted (WW1) and then boomed, and then wilted (WW2) and then only slowly came back around, with many ups and downs in between. The Empress was actually considered for demolition in the mid 60’s, but outcries and the pointing out (rightfully) that it was an iconic landmark caused it to get a cosmetic refurbishment (called operation Tea Cup) instead. Thankfully in 1989 they smartened up and did a true refurbishment that renewed its original grandeur and glory. A year before that, however, the hotel division of CPR was beginning to change. It bought out a large competitor, and began buying small hotels, and luxury hotels in international locations. They became Canadian Pacific Hotels and Resorts. The year 1999 had them buying the San Francisco Company called Fairmont hotel, and they decided in 2001 that they should call all their large luxury hotels the Fairmont hotel. So technically, the Empress hotel I knew was always the Fairmont Empress hotel. Okay, in 2006, Fairmont jumped into bed with a large LA hotel company called Colony Capital, and remains that way today. But what does that mean for the tea?


Well. The Empress hotel is no longer just a Canadian hotel; it is a half American one. I would suppose that after the merger, the American side wondered why the Empress should spend money with Murchies’s when they could get their tea blended elsewhere for much cheaper. All that truly mattered was that the blend was the same, the guests would know no different. Pfft, way to support your local community. Murchie’s really got the short stick of this agreement. Not only was the Empress no longer their client, but they were no longer even allowed to use the name for the signature blend. Such a treatment despite having who knows how long of a working relationship with each other, though I would assume it would be right at the Hotel’s beginning -- nearly a hundred years ago. From what I heard, they did try to fight back legally. But after spending quite a bit of money, and the cases going nowhere, Murchie’s dropped the suit and limped back home defeated. Which is why you now have Murchie’s Afternoon Blend, which in my humble opinion, tastes significantly better than the Empress blend of tea.

Here is a quote taken directly from the Empress Tea Box.

This blend of seasonal quality was specially created for afternoon tea at the Empress. The Assam component (2nd flush June production) gives a thick malty and full bodied character; the Kenya component (Kiambu region, January productions) gives floral-like flavour and golden coppery infusions; the South Indian Component (Nilgiri mountains, January production) gives superb fruity and sprightly flavour with a lovely finish; the Ceylon (Dimbula Region, January production) gives an airy almost piquant flavour that opens the blend; and the China (Anhui province, April production) gives a burgundy depth with light oaky notes. Truly one of the world's great teas!

You can purchase the Empress tea at the Empress Hotel, or email them at Shop@fairmont.com.
You can purchase Murchie's Afternoon blend in any Murchie's locations, or online.