I hosted my second virtual tea party yesterday to celebrate the launch of New Year’s Masquerade - and I had another fun announcement to make!

If you follow me on social media or via my newsletter, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I love tea. Especially when I’m reading, writing, or thinking about Regency Romance. It is just so much better when you’re drinking a nice cuppa!

That’s why I was really excited to find out about Adagio Tea’s custom blend series. Via their platform, you can now buy the official Countess Chronicles tea blends, which includes flavors for select characters from The Ideal Countess.

There are lots of fun things about this tea series:

1. A portion of every purchase goes to Room to Read, which promotes girls’ education and children’s literacy around the world

2. Adagio officially recognizes tea relationships, so you get a discount if you buy Alice and Hugh’s teas together <3

3. I curated these teas to reflect each character’s personality, so if you’re reading The Ideal Countess, your understanding of the characters will be amplified by drinking the appropriate teas!

Now, these are loose-leaf teas, which means you need to know how to prep tea properly in order to enjoy them. Since I myself didn’t know much about brewing tea before I met my husband, I thought I’d share my tips here.

Here is how to properly brew the perfect cup of loose-leaf tea:

1. You’ll need some sort of tea infuser or filter to hold your tea leaves. The infuser is multi-use, while the filters allow you to create one-time use tea bags. 

2. Put one teaspoon of tea leaves in your infuser for every cup of water 

3. Boil your water to the appropriate temperature. For black tea, you generally want boiling water. For green, white, or oolong teas, you want it a little bit cooler. Read more about that here.

4. Time how long your tea is brewing! Black tea should usually sit for 3-5 minutes (depending on how strong you like it) while the other teas are usually done after 2 minutes.

And then you’re done! I often like to add a dab of milk and a hearty sugar cube to the stronger teas (such as the Lady Windemere), but you can also enjoy these teas plain on their own. 

Now, I’ve got to get back to sipping tea and plotting Book 2!