Wolfgang Puck did it with pizza. Starbucks did it with coffee. Both tweaked an everyday food so successfully that ordering pepperoni or a just “coffee, black” is almost un-American. Now it’s tea’s turn for a flavor makeover.
The number of flavored teas available on store shelves today, bottled, boxed or bagged, is enough to make tea seem like a whole new beverage, even if the concept is centuries old. The ever-popular Earl Grey, for instance–scented with lavender and flavored with oil of bergamot–has been around since the mid-1800s. And Celestial Seasonings, which offers both herbal brews and teas enhanced with fruit, herbs, and spices, has been doing business since the early 1970s.
“Scenting and flavoring go hand in hand, and they have for a long time,” says Jack Strand, owner of The Strand Tea Co., a mail-order firm in Oregon. “Flower blossoms are often added for scent or color, along with, say, a sugar plum or black currant for flavor.”
Some teas are just scented, as with jasmine tea, Strand says, which the Chinese started producing in the Sung Dynasty around AD 900. Some are flavored: Ginger tea has oil of ginger and little dried ginger pieces added to the mix.
Flavoring is achieved either artificially, with a fine powder that is diluted and then sprayed on the tea leaves, or naturally, using concentrated juices or oils that are likewise misted over the leaves. Sometimes flavor results when herbs or spices are infused right along with tea leaves in the pot.
According to Strand, who sells 15 flavored teas and opts for the natural approach whenever possible, black teas (as opposed to green teas) are the most accepting of other flavors.
“And then there are teas one would never even think of flavoring, the Assam and Darjeeling being good examples,” he says. “They are so wonderful on their own.”
For tea connoisseurs, any flavored tea is anathema–tea for those who really don’t like tea.
“If you go to any professional tea conference, most people there will say that they disdain flavored teas,” Strand acknowledges. “But the fact is, flavored teas nationwide are an extremely strong market. They’re about 20 percent of our product line but 25 to 30 percent of our sales.”
Strand attributes this popularity, in part, to the comfort food factor. If you grew up with the smoky, spicy taste of Constant Comment, you may well look for something similar every time you order a pot.
“When people buy a flavored tea sampler, we say, `Would you like to try an estate-grown Darjeeling, or an Assam tea? Do you like a breakfast tea? We have several.’ We try to stretch their tea taste. But the fact is, flavored teas are extremely strong sellers.”
Leading the way are the bottled brews, from industry leaders such as Lipton and Snapple to relative newcomers such as Honest Tea, based in Bethesda, Md.
Sensitive to the connoisseur’s point of view, co-founder Seth Goldman notes, “What I think is important is if people are drinking tea they should be tasting the tea and with a lot of those bottled teas out there, what they’re really tasting is corn syrup with tea flavoring.” Goldman’s own product, brewed in spring water and sweetened with small amounts of natural sugars or honey, has 34 calories per 16-ounce bottle. Like Strand, he uses organic tea and natural flavorings whenever possible.
Although flavored tea might seem a marketing ploy more than anything else, tea drinkers elsewhere in the world are accustomed to enhancing their cups with more than milk and lemon. Honest Tea–which also sells tea bags, flavored and unflavored–offers a selection of teas inspired by tea-drinking habits around the world, including Moroccan Mint, an organic green tea blended with leaves of peppermint and spearmint, and Jakarta Ginger, which mingles ginger and lemon grass.
“We source tea from all around the world and find out what’s popular in various places,” Goldman says. “And just because something tastes good hot doesn’t mean it tastes good cold. Even Earl Grey, which is really popular hot, tastes pretty soapy cold.”
One world brew slowly making its way in the Midwest market is chai. Chai is itself is a word for tea, but it has become synonymous with a pre-mixed blend of black tea, cardamom, cinnamon and ginger that is combined with milk and drunk hot or cold.
Larry Kirsch, general manager of the Grand Avenue branch of Cosi, a chain of specialty sandwich shops, gets his tea loose from Harney & Sons, an importer based in Salisbury, Conn. The Cosi menu features black teas flavored with vanilla, hot cinnamon spice and passion fruit, as well as oolong scented with jasmine. Even with that manageable list of options to chose from, Kirsch says a good number of his customers still prefer the tried and true, such as English Breakfast.
But chai is quite popular, he reports. No wonder. Besides the straight-up version, Cosi pours the Chai Lullaby: chai with Captain Morgan’s rum and Irish Cream liqueur. Now that’s flavored tea.
