Journal

Peru Grows Tea. The Story Starts Below Cusco.

Tea grows around Huyro and Huayopata, where the Cusco region drops toward the Amazon. Its history includes a disputed 1913 ship story, unpaid estate labor, peasant unions, cooperatives, crisis, and...

How to Read a Tea Label

The line on the pouch, taken literally: what an origin line verifies, what the small print beside the name discloses, and how to read an ingredient panel like a buyer.

Which tea to drink when: morning, after meals, evening, with company

We built four blends because the day has at least four moments: a guide to which blend belongs to the morning, after meals, the evening, and company.

How to brew loose-leaf without overthinking it

No infuser, no thermometer: loose-leaf takes a strainer, a kettle, and the number on the pouch. The doses and steep times for all four blends, plus the one exception worth knowing.

What Is Camu Camu? The Amazon Fruit Too Sour to Eat

Fresh camu camu is almost too sour to eat, which is why the Peruvian Amazon juices, pulps, and blends it. Where the flooded-forest fruit comes from, and what it does in Gather.

What Is Muña? The Wild Mint of the Andes

Muña: the wild Andean mint behind the highlands' after-meal cup, and why it is not the black mint in Rooted.

Most evening tea isn't tea.

Sleepytime, Bedtime, Calm: the classic blends on the American bedtime shelf are tisanes, no tea leaf in the formula. Dusk is actual tea, and the black leaf is there for structure.

The After-Meal Tea America Never Imported

In Chile and Peru, lunch closes with a cup of boldo, a slow-growing, wild-harvested tree leaf. The plant, the after-lunch cup it makes, and why it anchors Rooted.

What the Organic Seal Verifies

Three years of soil records, an annual inspection, and a fee that lands hardest on small farms: what the USDA Organic seal proves, and how to read a tea label with or without it.

Peruvian Cardamom: The Cloud-Forest Spice in Daybreak

Nearly all the world's cardamom comes from India or Guatemala. Daybreak's grows in Peru's central cloud forest, under the coffee canopy of Villa Rica.