Personal Tea Blends
Hey all!
Just wondering if any of you make your own custom blends of tea, and if so, what do you blend together? Do you tend to stick with one type of tea, or do you experiment and mix different teas together (such as black and green, or rooibos and white, etc.). Do you add any dried fruits or fresh herbs/spices in addition to the tea? Any of your custom-blend recommendations would be interesting to hear!
As for myself, I haven’t blended anything yet, but I have a ton of plain rooibos and some Bourbon Street Vanilla Rooibos I would love to blend with something. Any suggestions would be awesome as well :)
i’ve got some assams that, while nice and smooth and not at all bad, i think would benefit from added flavor. have been thinking about combining them with rose or lavender or chai spice-type blends i’ve got around.
Yes. I am a tea scientist. Right now I’m drinking ceylon that’s been blended with earl grey green and artichoke green. It’s really subtle and brisk and dry with occasional notes of crunchy, almost-ripe peach.
I’ve blended just about everything with just about everything, and the one piece of advice I’d give is always brew a blended tea at the lowest suggested temperature for any of the teas in it – so if you’re making a green and black blend, like I’m drinking, brew it like a green tea, so you don’t burn parts of it. Think about what flavours you think would work together and then experiment with how much you need of what to allow everything to come through – some things tend to overpower more than others, like smoke or coconut; seriously, I swear if there’s more than a pinch of coconut, all I can taste is coconut. Maybe that’s just me.
Vanilla rooibos is a good blending candidate as well, as it’ll bring a little sweetness and dimension to just about anything. I tend to prefer it as part of a blend than on its own, actually!
Have fun!
Thanks for the advice! I didn’t even consider the steeping temperature when mixing delicate teas with more resilient ones. Is there any method to your madness…like how long does it typically take for you to create a blend worthy of keeping?
How long? Sometimes I just throw something together (like the other day, I wanted something that tasted of blueberry but more substantial than my white blueberry, so I added a little earl grey and oolong and a bit of almond, and suddenly blueberry muffins!) and then other times it’ll take me upwards of a month to get a balance and flavour profile exactly the way I want it, though that’s rare.
I make my own chai. Cloves, green cardamom, cinnamon, chili, fresh ginger when I brew it, with what ever basic black I have on hand. It’s a sort of never ending tin — whenever it looks low I take a gander at it and add more of what ever seems missing. The chili pepper I pull out once in a while and put in a new one – I never actually brew it. Odds and ends of suitable dark rich teas get added to it as they turn up. I keep a green tea tin too, that odds and ends of green and light styled teas get dumped into.
I’ve added an herbal chai to a black tea. I’ve also considered adding peppermint to some blends.
In the summer I brew a basic black tea and add fresh spearmint … Yum! It’s one of the teas I grew up drinking & now it’s a summer staple at my own home.
I like adding things to rooibos, because I have a lot of it in a larger jar. So I’ll add a some crumbled cinnamon stick, or lemon zest, or fresh ginger; it’s fun, but not really complicated.
Sadly, I didn’t even think of adding every-day spices to rooibos as you mentioned. That sounds delicious! I’ll definitely have to try the cinnamon or fresh lemon zest
I like mixing up odds and ends, but I don’t necessarily have an end plan when I’m doing it. I log mine under the Chance Combinations listing on here.
I mixed my own Moroccan Mint tea for Christmas gifts. It ended up being an equal volume of gunpowder green, the smokier the better, and peppermint. The peppermint isn’t really traditional, but I prefer it over the taste of spearmint. I want to start working on a Chai recipe, but I haven’t done that yet.
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