Tea Blends: Wizard's Tea

Wizard is possibly the weirdest tea blend I've put together. Not because it involves any unusual ingredients, in fact many of these ingredients show up in most of my blends, but because it's spicy.  I've added pepper to blends before for a tiny bit of kick, but this is drink slowly or suffer territory. This makes it less of an all day every day kind of tea, but it's great when you're in the mood.

Wizard's Tea (a breakfast/lapsang blend)

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

The blend:
For every teaspoon of breakfast blend (in this case, an Irish Breakfast tea), 

 - 1/4 teaspoon lapsang souchong
 - 1/4 teaspoon whole peppercorns
 - 1/4 teaspoon candied ginger

 - 1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes

 - 1/8 teaspoon of orange rind

 - 1/4 stick of cinnamon
Dial the two peppers up or down to meet your spice tolerance. This is currently set to mine. The red pepper flakes give it that immediate "Ow! My tongue's burning! Why is this happening?" flavor, while the peppercorns contribute to the more back of the tongue slow burning spice.

Steep at boiling for ~5 minutes. It won't oversteep easily, but the pepper will keep making it spicier, and if spicy tea is weird, spicy lukewarm tea is even weirder. 3/10 do not recommend.

Notes on ingredients:
 - The Irish Breakfast tea is from Upton Tea Imports, my all time favorite online shop, particularly for ordering several small batches of different types of tea to see which you prefer. It focuses more on selections of tea leaves, locations, and qualities than on making its own fruit and flower blends, which is helpful for my purposes.

 - The lapsang souchong is from MEM Tea Imports.

 - Everything else is cobbled together from spice sections.

Notes on design:
I don't actually remember when I decided to make the Wizard tea spicy. I knew I wanted it to be highly caffeinated, for late night wizard research sessions, but I was trying to tie it in to Sun and Moon, and for the longest time I didn't have Moon finalized. I think I expected this to become a breakfast blend with some lapsang and lavender, which sounds far less interesting. Instead, fire became the primary theme for this drink, the title "Where There's Smoke, There's Fire" came to mind, and everything went downhill from there. It's smokey, spicy, and highly caffeinated, with the orange and cinnamon (of which I am, perhaps, overly fond) pulling it back into something a bit richer than a two note flavor profile. My one regret is that I still haven't figured out a good way to get ginger's full bite into the drink.

Handle with care! I'm not yet certain what's going to happen with Wonder, and I'll probably have to poke at the kuding again for experiment's sake, but one way or another there will be a tea update in seven days. See you then!