July is here and along with it blueberry season! Local blueberry growers are bursting with these delightful little orbs of flavor. Embrace the season and serve some fine blueberry inspired teas to delight your guests!

Here are our suggestions for July:

White Blueberry – A best seller all year long, this variety is stellar this time of year for its light-bodied white tea goodness in addition to a summery blueberry taste. Good hot or iced.

Berry Blues - A popular caffeine-free herbal blend comprised of apple pieces, hibiscus flowers, cranberries and blueberries. Refreshing and berry-licious, good hot or iced, some prefer this tisane with a little sweetener added, while others enjoy its natural tartness from the hibiscus.

Blueberry Black - makes a great fuller bodied iced tea with blueberry taste... more

June has gone by fast and furiously for us at Adagio Teas with so many recent trade shows. As always it was great to get out and meet folks! For those that we had the pleasure of seeing, hope you enjoyed the shows as much as we did and think you will agree that every show was high energy, bustling with activity and really a great sign that the economic squeeze is relinquishing its boa constrictor-like grasp. It certainly seems business owners are gaining confidence and ready to grow.

The first signs of these hints of recovery were at the Winter Fancy Food Show back in January, but after the situation in Greece affected so many other economies, we weren’t sure what to expect, but the National Restaurant Show, World Tea Expo and Summer Fancy Food in NYC have all reported great turnouts and yielded many leads that seem to indicate the popularity of tea is still on a strong upswing!

From our tea-centric perspective, business owners seem to focusing on raising quality even in fast casual style restaurants, leaving behind standard fanning-filled tea bag options for either loose teas or premium, usually pyramid style teabags... more

The dream I had eleven years ago, first starting out in the fine tea world as an enthusiast turned tea biz manager, was that a tea drinker could walk into almost any establishment and find great tea has been coming closer and closer to fruition. This dream seems to be shared by many in the tea industry and is perhaps what unites us. At each show we get to see many of our competitors, and with few exceptions, we chat, we hug, we discuss our progresses and our failures. Guidance is offered to those trying to launch products others have experience with. It is really one of the great things about our relatively young industry here in the US - and certainly what facilitates success.

For those newer to the specialty tea industry, it is easy to see what has yet to be and what needs to be improved, but when those of us who have been around awhile sit and reflect on what has been accomplished, the progress is impressive. Nowadays we seem to have more tearooms, more teashops and more tea presence in general... more