Lady Devotea’s Fancy (Devotea Origins Part III)

Series Note: I’ve decided to write a series that covers all our blends and what inspired them. And this is Part III

Our White Tea Concoctions range is so far only available in Australia, but I’m sure that a few thousand people marching through the streets of your town will convince us to immediately start supplying them to your area, if just for the sake of civil harmony.

The range of four teas is wholly and solely Lady Devotea’s idea.

One day she instructed me: “we need an Apple and Cranberry White tea”.

This seemed a bit outside of our range to me, so I of course enquired as to why.

Carefully it was explained to me that whilst I might be really good at thinking up oddball blends, I was not really aware of trends.
Of course I protested at this idea. Do I not follow all the fora? Am I not always conversing with tea nerds world wide? Do I not read all the scientific literature. Do I not follow the tea press?

Halfway through this spirited defense of my own place at the centre of the tea universe I realised I was wrong. Tea trends do not happen within the tea community, but outside.

Here’s an example: Tea Geek’s Michael Coffey holds a tea salon about Ali Shan Oolong and eight of us turn up – three even bought the tea beforehand. Meanwhile, “Dr Oz” implies that drinking oolong will take an inch of lard off of your backside and a zillion serves of oolong get sold. Probably as teab*gs.

We don’t make tea trends here, on these pages. If we did, I rather suspect boba/bubble tea would not even exist (though I actually love it myself for reasons I can’t explain*).

So we created the project to research and create a white tea range. The original title of the range was to be “Lady Devotea’s Fancy”.

After insisting on Apple and Cranberry – a tea that took some blending and the reason we bought a large dehydrator – Lady Devotea also opined that Liquorice was necessary. After a bit of experimentation, this remains one of my favourite teas – it’s kind of “inky”. When we taste test it, it’s the coffee drinking men that start slurping this.

I chimed in with an idea for Lemongrass and Ginger – not exactly original, but it occurred as we were discussing it over a Chinese meal. And finally, when Lady Devotea suggested we needed a Peppermint variety, we decided to recreate our 1001 Nights Blend as a white tea.

It’s called White Nights, which is one of my favourite blend names.

Each of them is a blend of several white teas, and all follow a different ratio of the various whites. They are blended so that one can actually taste the tea.

Having created them around the time of the last Australian Spring, they didn’t really move until we convinced the cafés that stock our tea to sell them iced during the summer heat.

All of these teas ice well, and we have even now bought an iced tea dispenser for our pop-up tea shop.

So, that’s the story of our White Tea Concoctions.

I’ll leave you to paint your protest signs and plan the route of your street march.

*OK, so I can explain it. It’s the sugar, the ice, the tea, the flavouring, the milk and getting to watch the machine flounce it up and down. And cracking the film across the top with a pointed straw.