The Power of Tea in a Crisis

Keeping Cool with Tea

•  A quick tip on how to keep cool this summer. Pour your favourite brewed Stir Tea into an ice cube tray and add a slice of lemon! Freeze overnight and pop into your water on a hot day!

•  Lots of juicy peaches around at the moment so we thought how about combining these with some brewed Stir Masala Chai to create a refreshing iced tea.  We boiled a couple of freshly sliced peaches in two cups of hot water along with two tablespoons of sugar to make a syrup. Once the syrup was thick and fragrant we removed the peaches and cooled the syrup for a good hour.  Grab some ice in a tall glass, pour over your brewed and cooled masala chai tea, then sweeten with your peach syrup and top with more sliced peaches. 

•  Fresh Brew - because it is so simple to turn our herbal and fruit blends into a delicious iced beverage we recommend brewing fresh each day.  Let your brew steep overnight to extract the maximum flavour and then pour over ice the next day.  If any sweetening is required try slices of ripe seasonal fruit.  This is a great way to create an after school beverage and also control the amount of sugar.  Looking for inspiration, then consider these blends heavenly lemon, apple pie, rosie plum, blood orange.

•  If you have any brewed tea liquor left over then rather than disposing of it just pop it aside to use later in the day as a smoothie base, iced tea or freeze as ice-cubes for popping in your water bottle or jug.  We also use it to soak chia seed in (rosie plum is delicious for this)  or to soak bircher muesli or porridge oats overnight (apple pie is delicious)

Recommendations and other Stir Tea Matters

(a) Interest in kombucha (a fermented beverage using tea leaf as a base) is still very high.  Teas regularly being used by our clients as their base are - lapsang souchong (delicious with ginger syrup added) and earl grey blueflower.  We also recommend two of our new blends ginger peach and soursop black (2 organic black teas which have a sweetness to them) as a great option..

(b) If you are entertaining friends with food allergies or planning a party - here is a good guide from Fresh Cup magazine on allergies and what to avoid.  It is aimed at the hospitality industry but it is a good reference for anyone.

(c) Over the past few months we have been working on some new teas for you.  We have released a number of new teas or reintroduced some old favourites.  These are:  Black Tea - Ginger Peach,
Soursop Black and Coconut Cream Black
(a tweaked favourite with more coconut added).
Green Tea - Green Tea Pear, Ginseng Green Tea.  
White Tea - White Tea  Pomegranate (an old favourite)
Caffeine Free - Heavenly Lemon (this is super popular), Pure Red Rooibos, Pure Green Rooibos

• Newsletter subscriber draw
Subscribing to our newsletter puts you in the draw for a Stir gift.  The most recent one was for a beautiful package containing a variety pack, a duo teapot, a tea timer and a Beautiful Day diary (this is a new diary from Claire Turnbull at Mission Nutrition that has a rolling start date during the year and contains daily hints and recipes throughout), total value $96.  Congratulations to Prue from Dunedin, our lucky subscriber winner. 

If you are visiting Queenstown in the near future pop along and find us on our tea stand at Remarkables Market each Saturday between 9.00am and 2.00pm.

Until next time, wishing you Good Health and Happy Tea Times.  Thank you for being part of the Stir community. Michelle Casson, Stir Tea, Queenstown