Recently I discovered the website of an interesting tea shop in Salem, Massachusetts.

The tea shop is called Jolie Tea and is located on Essex Street near the Salem Common.

I ordered a sampler of teas called The Best of Salem. The teas are Grand Turk, Hawthorne, King Derby and Sophia Blend. Each of these teas has a connection to Salem and more specifically Nathaniel Hawthorne. In future posts I will give more information about each of the teas.

Tonight I will share a bit about the Sophia Blend. This tea is for Sophia Peabody who was the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Sophia also lived in the building that now houses Jolie Tea when she was young.

The picture above comes from a biography written by Julian Hawthorne titled Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. I have read several biographies about the family since I ordered the tea.

Sophia had two sisters who were also well know. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was involved in the early Kindergarten movement in the US and her sister Mary was the wife of Horace Mann another early educator.

The Sophia Blend tea is a blend of Indian black tea, Chinese Congou black tea, rose petals and bergamot oil. The rose petals have special significance as Nathaniel and Sophia had a daughter named Rose. Julian who is mentioned above was their son and they also had a daughter named Una.

Here I am set up ready to try the Sophia Blend tea. I chose to use my Tuesday tea towel even though I didn’t try the tea on a Tuesday. This is because how Nathaniel and Sophia met and fell in love is such a great story. However, I will not tell it here 🙂

I probably should have used a mesh tea ball instead of my glass infuser. The tea is loose leaf tea, but the leaves are not very large.

However, only a few of the leaves snuck through. The tea had a nice color and a nice aroma.

There was a nice balance between the black tea and the bergamot. It was definitely there, but not as strong as most Earl Grey teas. In fact, earlier tonight I had some Earl Grey just to taste the difference.

I look forward to tasting the rest of the teas in the sampler.

Steven