Tea Blends: Wizard and Moon Updates!

Scrolling through Adagio's catalog a couple of weeks ago, I found that they carry dried ginger! So I immediately purchased some, (along with a few other mix-ins), and went to revisit some of my ginger-based blends. The dried ginger is everything that I wanted it to be, and unsurprisingly superior to chopping up bits of candied ginger that you happen to have at home.

That said, the recipes require a little tweaking to handle the new ingredient:

Faithful of the Moon (Revised)
For every teaspoon of white tea,
 - 1/4 teaspoon lapsang souchong
 - 1/8 teaspoon of sage
 - 1/8 teaspoon ginger
 - a pinch of lavender (or better yet, jasmine)
Steep at ~180°F for four or five minutes.

The changes: The sharpness of the ginger means that it can be halved from the original recipe, and finally reaching something closer to the flavor profile I'd been aiming at means that the sage can take more of a center stage. The lavender, on the other hand, needs to be dialed back. I didn't have any jasmine on hand, unfortunately, but from the get go I wanted this to be a jasmine blend, since the dried flowers look like little moons, and with the new ginger/sage flavor I think the jasmine would finally work.

Wizards Tea (Revised)
For every teaspoon of breakfast blend (in this case, an Irish Breakfast tea),
 - 1/4 teaspoon lapsang souchong
 - 1/4 teaspoon whole peppercorns
 - 1/8 teaspoon candied ginger
 - 1/8 teaspoon of orange rind
 - a pinch of red pepper flakes
 - 1/4 stick of cinnamon
Steep at boiling for ~5 minutes.

The changes: Again, the dried ginger has a much stronger and sharper flavor than the candied, and should be halved in this recipe. Additionally, the change enhances the spiciness, so I recommend dialing back on the red pepper flakes.

I'm much happier with both of these blends now, and once I track down some jasmine I might mix up a larger batch of the Gibbous Moon blend to drink more regularly.

I make no promises regarding regularity of tea updates here in the future, but there are a few posts lingering on my queue of old, and I'm still making new blends off and on. I'm trying one out currently that's nothing to write home about and has no particular theme, but I'll see about sharing such thoughts here more often.