Any tea blends you love?

I have been wanting to experiment with mixing unflavored teas together. maybe even add herbs and flowers. I am thinking about this because I live right near San Francisco and love checking out Blue Bottle and Philz Coffee, and they blend coffee, but never add anything else. In the tea world unflavored tea leaves dont usually get blended together (other than a breakfast blend), but is there potential?

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There is always potential. Blending has a long history in tea. Traditionally, it has been often used to hide poorer quality teas but there are plenty out there that blend good quality teas as well. Some of the most famous blends in tea include Earl Grey and Lapsang Souchong and Jasmine tea. Plus, as you mentioned the breakfast blends are normally a combination of different black teas. Even Darjeeling tea is usually a combination of different teas.

Really the sky is the limit with your experiments. However, if you are looking at this as a possible business, you have to keep the idea of costs involved and what your customers will like which will dictate a lot of decisions from what teas to use, herbs/spices/flowers, and whether to use natural or artificial flavorings.

If you are thinking in terms of a possible busines, I would say give your idea some more thought on exactly what you would want to do and maybe do a few experiments for yourself and some close friends or family and go from there. Hope this helps.

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Go for it! Many successful blends are the same tea type. Irish and English Breakfast teas are usually a combo of Assam and Ceylon.

It would be great to see more South/East Asian blends. Yunnans mixed with Darjeelings, Assams mixed with Fujians, that kind of thing. And think of all the different varieties of oolong! The possibli-teas are endless.

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I was thinking about this and another increasingly more common blend is to mix shou and sheng pu-erhs to give the younger variety a more aged taste.

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ashmanra said

Queen Catherine is a blend of three Chinese teas with no other flavoring by Harney and Sons. I am pretty fond of it!

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