Did you know that nothing is ever really static in the tea industry? Think about it for a minute – every year gardens grow more camellia sinensis, and those “two leaves and a bud” that are plucked for your daily cuppa' tea are different from year to year. In fact, it’s a lot like wine and grapes, but few people who don't work in the tea business probably think about this while they're steeping tea leaves.

So it makes sense that our founder and CEO, Richard Rosenfeld, spends a lot of time tasting different blends of tea. “It can be very difficult – every season we have to get new tea. Our Assam this year was particularly challenging, because two primary producers decided to stop producing organic tea,” he says. “We needed to find organic Assam at other gardens, and that’s part of what we do – we drive more gardens to grow organic.”

And as we’ve discussed here before, since the vast majority of tea that is grown is cut, torn and curled into those tiny pieces of tea used in typical tea bags, finding quality, whole leaf, AND organic tea is “nigh on impossible,” Richard says

But besides blending tea each year to make sure that the flavor of the actual tea – which comes from camellia sinensis – stays quality, what about our herbal teas? Turns out, we recently revamped the taste of two of our herbals: Organic Pomi-Berry and our Organic African Sunset, which is rooibos.

“I’m not a huge herbal tea drinker,” Richard says. “I wanted to get to the point where I liked them – more than just being satisfied about them. I wanted to be enthusiastic about drinking them.”

With Organic Pomi-Berry, Richard says he was looking at a cup of it right next to our Alpine Berry, and noticing how dark Alpine Berry is in the cup, and how rich its flavor is. “I thought wow, it would be nice if we could give Pomi-Berry a little life like that,” he says.

So what did we do? We added some pomegranate peel for more berry flavor and an extra punch. Find it on our website to see what you think – the newest boxes of tea take a while to reach stores.

As for the Organic African Sunset, we added lemon balm for more lemon flavor, and a hint of peppermint for a sharpness that Richard likes. “What results is a lot more complex in flavor. In fact, it’s made me a rooibos drinker!” he says.

Try our new blends of Organic Pomi-Berry and Organic African Sunset, and let us know what you think. As Richard says, “We blend for flavor – that’s why our's is the best bag of organic tea you can buy."