Walnuts and such

It's been a busy week at Informal Tea. Not only is it walnut season, but we're just about to burst into 3 cafes and Earth Hour is coming up this weekend which is gonna be chooooice. 

Lets start with the most important matters first. Walnut season. It's great! It's a bit like a prequel to Easter except instead of hunting down chocolate eggs, you spend your time hunting the grass for nuts. 

Despite last week's wind there's still a few hanging about.

We've got tons of the things now. And although nuts can't be blended with tea, we still think they're worth having. Simply because there aren't many more satisfying things in the world than picking up these expensive little suckers off the ground!

Speaking of tea, we've been doing a bit of experimentation as of late. We got our hands on some of these Chilean Guavas (aka New Zealand Cranberries) this week. They look awesome and taste great too. They have that distinctive Guava taste but with more of a sweet rather than sour tone which we think could go well in our Berries Etc. 

Fresh Chilean Guavas above, and dehydrated Guavas ready for tea tasting bellow.

We're also working on getting some local organic lemon into our Lemon-ish to give it that extra oomph. Most lemon green teas rely on 'lemon flavoring' which is just a bunch of chemicals that taste like lemon. What a cop-out. We've been working on these delicious baked lemon bits: 

The flavour gets infused throughout skin + rind and taste so good by itself it's almost a crime to put it in tea. But we're ruthless tea moguls and we don't care, we'll use em anyway! Haha

Yeah, so anyway, the new Lemon season is just around the corner which mean we'll be looking to kick the baked lemon bits into production over winter. We'll keep you updated.

We'll also keep you posted on the cafe scene this week. And don't forget about Earth Hour this weekend. If you're in Tauranga, we'd love to see you. If you're not, you should join the cause anyway because earth loves you.