How to Make Your Own Tea Blend: Tips From Our Blenders

Our blenders’ eight tips, in short:

1. Treat it as a rule-free game. There are no set recipes and no conventions; blending is driven by mood, and you never know what you may end up creating.
2. Learn more flavors. Professional blenders spend years getting to know spices, fruits, vegetables and other aromatics. At home, a few spices, sprigs of herbs and flowers from the garden are enough to start; the key is learning to balance flavors.
3. Be fearless. Do not hold back from throwing strawberries, lemongrass and hibiscus into a tea, because flavor can work in surprising ways.
4. Taste the ingredients on their own first, so you can imagine how they will work together.
5. Use dried ingredients. They have more concentrated flavor and brew better than fresh. A rosebud drying in the vase is a blend in waiting.
6. Keep pieces a similar size. Crush spices, use single petals or small buds, and chop dried fruit evenly, or the small, heavy bits settle at the bottom of the jar.
7. Keep the tea the hero: nearly two-thirds tea, and less of the added ingredient the lighter the tea.
8. Start with one or two ingredients and build up; layered blends take time and skill.

The eighth tip in the original post is about iced tea, which has its own section below. The tips were written with input from Shruti, our blender at the time, whose own test was simple: a good blender must “love the tea in its pure form even before it enters a blend.”

The two-thirds rule keeps the tea in charge. For a strong black tea such as an Assam, you can push the spices further; with a first flush Darjeeling, keep additions light and gentle, such as a few petals of lavender or chamomile.

It is a home guideline, not a law. Some of our own holiday dessert blends have carried far more cinnamon or nuts than that, because the spice was meant to lead. Natural liquid flavorings work the other way: our blenders use them in very small amounts, a tiny fraction of the blend by weight, because a little goes a long way.

Brew a home blend for its base tea, not for the additions: hotter water for black blends, cooler for green and white. For temperatures, see How do you brew flavored tea?

For iced tea, taste the tea over ice first. Darjeelings take sugar syrup and mint well; Nepal teas like plenty of fresh fruit; Nilgiri and Assam teas accommodate spices and milk. A good iced tea is bright and clear, not cloudy.

When we made our first iced teas in 2015, the R&D team tasted every trial hot first, “since cold numbs the palate,” then again chilled. It was a cycle of “blending-steeping-tasting-adjusting” that ran for over a month, and it ended with 10 blends, including one inspired by the raw mango drink aam panna and, the surprise of the pack, a coffee-flavored iced tea. Many fruit, mint and floral blends work iced: see How to make iced tea.

Tea concentrates make good mocktails too. One of our holiday recipes stirs 120 ml of ginger tea concentrate with 80 ml of litchi juice, 5 ml of rose water and 15 ml of sugar syrup over ice, garnished with julienned ginger and rose petals.

Our R&D takes three to six months, and its calendar always runs ahead of the season. For our 2016 Diwali collection, Nagendranath Chiluvuru, then our R&D head in Siliguri, worked from what the festival meant to him and sourced ingredients to suit. “We developed prototypes … Every idea went through many iterations.” From 15 ideas in the beginning, the team arrived at 6 blends.

Tasting is the test at every stage. In 2015 Shruti tried each new blend on everyone around her, including the packers, though only “a rare few like Gomden sir (an old tea hand)” would give critical feedback; that was Arun Kumar Gomden, the veteran Darjeeling tea maker. Today every new blend is tasted again by our tasting team as a quality check before it launches.

Most blends are seasonal

Many of our flavored teas were made for one festival and then retired. Between 2015 and 2018 our Diwali and Christmas collections included Indian Marigold, Coco Berry, Cinnamon Pop, Sweet Serenity, Orange Spice, White Holly, Rose Drop Black, Creamy Coconut Black, Kewra Oolong and Merry Marshmallow Black. Only a handful lived on, among them Caramel Spice, a fruit and nut tisane, and Champer’s Holiday, the one survivor of our 2017 Christmas set. For a home blender the lesson is the same: start with many ideas and keep only the best.

Even professionals get it wrong. Our blenders once smoked roses over wood, hoping for a sweet, woody tea; the rose simply burned. A pumpkin spice tea failed because fresh, dried and freeze-dried pumpkin were all too mild to taste. And a saffron vanilla chai ran to fifteen versions in one day, “the worst tea we’ve ever made.” Read the whole tale in Tea Blends That Didn’t Quite Make It.

Each failure echoes one of the tips. Smoking tea over wood such as teak, sal or pine usually works wonderfully; it was the rose that could not take it. The pumpkin was simply too mild, which is why it pays to taste each ingredient on its own first. And the saffron vanilla chai began as a straightforward blend of CTC chai, vanilla, saffron and spices; the team changed the concentrations of the spices, the saffron and the vanilla again and again, and nothing put it right. The team still dreams of a rose-flavored woody tea.

Our team has poached pears in Mountain Rose black tea and served them with mascarpone cream and muesli. For a Thanksgiving plum cake, we gave a classic recipe a citrus twist with half a cup of Earl Grey black tea liquor, a teaspoon of lemon zest, and soaked raisins, walnuts, cashews and dates.