Tea is tea varieties and specialty blends, and coffee is coffee gift baskets and gourmet selections—and traditionally, never the twain shall meet. Or do they? While some tea drinkers avoid coffee entirely, and some coffee enthusiasts feel the same way about tea, others enjoy both and are open to crossing these flavor boundaries.
Regardless of your preference, a growing number of hybrid tea and coffee products are worth exploring. One example is cascara, a beverage prepared similarly to tea but made from the dried coffee cherry surrounding the bean. Although often treated as a by-product of coffee production, cascara has long been brewed as a tea-like drink in various parts of the world. Learn more in this overview of cascara, or coffee cherry tea.
If coffee leaf tea sounds appealing, there is also a traditional version known as kootee or qutti. Popular in Ethiopia, it is brewed much like tea and often flavored with milk and spices such as cardamom, similar to chai. Moving closer to coffee, products like Teabean white coffee with tea-like flavor characteristics offer another hybrid experience.
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