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It's time to introduce our new Tea Tokens rewards program!

We wanted a way to reward our repeat customers and fellow tea lovers so we added Tea Tokens.  Every time you make a purchase you will automatically earn Tea Tokens that you can redeem for free tea on our Redeem Tea Tokens page!  What is required to register?  Nothing!  Just do what you're already doing, enjoy your tea and earn tea freebies!  Tea Tokens are just one more way for you to have fun while visiting California Tea House.

Making purchases isn't the only way to earn Tea Tokens.  Every time you leave a product review, blog comment or forum comment you will earn Tea Tokens as well.  Here's a summary of actions and the amount of Tea Tokens that will be credited to your account as a result: 

*  It's easy to send referral emails to all your family and friends and earn free Tea Tokens.  After you place a purchase, on the transaction completion page you can enter as many emails as you like.  Referrals will receive $5 off toward CaliforniaTeaHouse and you will earn 50 Tea Tokens when your referral makes their first purchase!  You can track your referrals and add more at the bottom of the 'My Friends' section of your profile. 

**  Please only review teas and products that you have tried.  Also, keep blog and forum comments on topic.  Any spam will be deleted and tokens will be removed.  

HAVE FUN!

We were pretty excited to try the next set of our Los Angeles 'Stair Walks' after having a lot of fun on the Los Feliz steps last weekend.  Today was round two of our stair climbing - tea drinking - prepare for Mount Whitney series.  This time we chose the La Loma steps of Pasadena.  

I read a good article this past week in the LA Times blog about battling fat with green tea and exercise.  We were glad to see studies being done on the contribution of tea and exercise to good health and staying fit.  So far I haven't seen or read about anyone else actually combining tea drinking and working out at the same time, but we'll let you know how it works for us.  With this article fresh on my mind about green tea, we decided to pair our Jasmine Pearls green tea with today's La Loma stair walk.  Again, we chilled the tea in a steel thermos overnight.  The Jasmine Pearls is very good cold.  You don't get the wonderful aroma of the Jasmine that you get when it's served hot, but the taste is just as great cold as it is hot. 

Compared to the stair walk of Los Feliz, the Pasadena La Loma stair walk is much more like interval training with stairs going up and down in elevation versus going straight up.  This walk is through a quiet Pasadena hillside neighborhood with the constant shade of pretty street trees and peek-a-boo views of the city and hillsides.  It's hard to compete with the Griffith Observatory summit of last week's walk, but La Loma is a lot more private and great for a date stroll!  We only came across two other groups of friends enjoying the walk and there's no traffic noise at all. 

Again, the tea was a great companion to the walk.  It really gives an added pick-me-up to the workout without any jitters.  La Loma consists of 480 steps which we did round trip twice bringing our total step count for today to 1920 steps.  While we were walking I downloaded the Trimble Outdoors hike tracker on my Blackberry, and I thought it would be fun to track the walks on the GPS maps and share them here. I tracked our last lap of the steps so you can use the map to locate the La Loma Stair Walk for yourself and see the elevation changes, distance, etc. 

Ani and I believe in a healthy balanced lifestyle. We work out multiple times a week, eat naturally low-fat and low-sugar foods and of course drink our daily tea!

I've noticed a lot of popularity with caffeine and working out lately. This caffeine popularity got me researching caffeine medical studies and apparently drinking caffeine while working out increases endurance and allows you to 'go the extra mile' during your routine. The conflict I notice though is I see people drinking so-called 'energy drinks' and coffee during their workouts, but the studies I read say that moderate caffeine such as 50mg during workouts is ideal. Coffee and energy drinks have closer to 150-300mg of caffeine and the caffeine in energy drinks is typically not natural. This got me thinking that since tea is completely natural, has many health benefits other than endurance and has about 35-50mg of caffeine (depending on the type) that tea may be the perfect workout drink.

Last week, Ani signed us both up (without warning) to climb Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states. Having only 2 1/2 months to get ready for this, we need to jump our endurance workouts into high gear. We decided to supplement our weekly workouts with one or two weekend hikes or climbs. I had read a great article in Los Angeles Magazine called ‘Stair Walks’ about these 8 scenic stair climbs that exist throughout Los Angeles. We decided this series of stair climbs were the perfect weekend workouts to prepare for the Mount Whitney climb. To boost these workouts and test the benefits of drinking caffeine with working out, we decided to pair a tea with each of our climbs.

So today was Day One of the Los Angeles stair climbing - tea drinking - prepare for Mount Whitney workout series. Ani and I chose the classic scene of the Glendower Steps in the beautiful, old neighborhood of Los Feliz. I got to choose the tea for this one, so I chose one of my favorite teas, our Big Red Robe Oolong. I didn't want to drink hot tea nor have melted ice in our tea, so we brewed the tea last night, put it in a stainless steel thermos and put it in the refrigerator overnight. If you are planning on trying this yourself, make sure you use a stainless steel thermos without a liner and no plastic as the chemical BPA used to make the plastic bottles and liners has estrogen mimicking effects which can cause breast and prostate cancer.

I have to say, I thought this hike was going to be really hard on me as I work out a lot, but I mostly lift weights and it's been a long time since I've done any endurance training. We actually had so much energy that after climbing the stairs, we searched out historical homes in the area, like the Ennis House by Frank Lloyd Wright, and then pressed on to hike to the Griffith Observatory with some amazing views of downtown Los Angeles and the Hollywood sign. Then on the way back we decided to go back up the first half consisting of 181 steps and do them again, bringing Day One to a total of 1,510 steps plus the Griffith Observatory hike. I know this hike was far from being anywhere near the shape we need to be in to be prepared for climbing Mount Whitney, but I was proud of us. I do believe combined with incredible views and having a summit as nice as Griffith Observatory that the Oolong tea did give us a very noticeable boost in endurance and energy. Throw in the fact that Oolong tea is good for your skin, hair and helps natural weight loss, I'd say the first tea exercise experiment was a success. I hope you enjoy the images we took while on our hike.

Happy Mother's Day

From now until Mother's Day, say "I love you!" and "I care about you!" to the one person who has loved you since the day you were born.  Give Mom the gift of gourmet loose leaf tea.  Whether your mom is an avid tea drinker or you're just now getting her hooked on a health kick that doctors swear by, gourmet tea is the perfect gift for Mother's Day.

For every purchase until Mother's Day, write the word 'BLOOM' in the Comment section of the checkout and get a FREE Blooming Tea!

Enjoy!

As you may have seen healthily posted throughout the web, we are going to give away a 50% OFF coupon good for any and everything on our online tea store to all our newsletter subscribers on September 15th!

There is no catch. Everyone on the mailing list will receive the coupon so make sure you're signed up before the 15th!

Don't let your friends miss out on this deal either.. it's not everyday we just give this tasty stuff away!