Hey everyone, hope you are all well and here's a short note...

...you may have noticed that we've started to roll out a name change across a number of our online spaces. For a while now we've been thinking that we needed to move on from the original company name, 'Guayusa Tea Shop'.

After some thought we have decided that the name that feels right is to trade as 'The Guayusa Co'. It sounds warm, is simple and clean - and allows us to expand the range with a number of exciting things we have in progress.

Legally, the official name will be 'The Guayusa Company Ltd.'

We will explain more of our thinking in a later blog post, but just wanted to ask for your patience and understanding if things look a little 'digitalyl confused' over the next few days - there's a lot to update - not only on the front end but also in the admin areas of the many platforms we use to keep the online side of things running.

Thank you as always for your support!

James and Linda

We are sure you'll know that guayusa has become popular in the U.S.A. as a clean, naturally caffeinated energy drink.

Beyond brewing as a hot tea, extracts of the leaves are used to make other products, such as ready to drink flavoured cold teas, in cans and bottles.

We only have to look at the latest flavours from Runa to see the traction this amazing leaf is getting in the commercial world.

You'll also be aware that, before the relatively recent popularisation of guayusa as a delicious, energising beverage, guayusa has long been revered by people of the Amazon, such as the Kichwa.

This article from Vice tells us that, for the Kichwa people, it has functions beyond a natural source of caffeine. These include it being a stomach tonic, diuretic, providing relief for body aches and believing it to increase fertility.

The Kichwa also use it in the interpretation of dreams, gathering together before the dawn breaks, sharing the stories of their dreams before starting their daily activities.

Back in December, we had a message from one of our customers who was very excited to tell us about an event he was planning - a traditional guayusa tea ceremony. He asked if we'd be able to help out with the promotion of the event.

Hey all just throwing up this little animation we made of ten reasons we love guayusa tea. These aren't the only reasons, but they're good ones :)

Discover more detail on our original blog

Ten reasons we love #guayusa tea! Discover more on our blog at guayusateashop.co/10reasons

A post shared by Guayusa Tea Shop (@guayusateashop) on May 18, 2017 at 1:02pm PDT

Hi everyone, we hope everything is good with you and thank you as always for your support and custom.

We wanted to let you know about a few changes to our shipping prices and policies.

We've been trading for just over a year and a half now, and we've always been making a bit of a loss on the postage costs.

We've tried to keep these fixed for as long as possible, but with lots of other things going up in price, we regrettably can't sustain it. For example, it costs us about £3.50 to post one packet of tea including the packaging, but we've only been charging £2.50. 

From March the 5th 2017, we will need to change the postage prices to more closely match the prices we are charged by the Post Office - and for the cost of the jiffy bags, boxes and stickers etc.

Read on to learn more.

We gave up coffee as our daily source of caffeine in favour of Guayusa (a caffeinated holly that grows in the Amazon rainforest) about 3 years ago. Since we first fell in love with it a lot has happened.

We adored it so much that we wanted to tell more people about it, and we worked hard around our busy day jobs to find out how to start a tea business! There’s no time here to list everything that was involved, but it’s now about a year and a half since we started trading, and we have so many more plans!

We have learned so much. One thing we've learned is that if you feel a passion about something so much that you can’t stop thinking, or talking, about it - and you want to build a living around it - you can. You might have to put in some extra hours - and be able to sustain it (for what feels like quite a while) - but if that love doesn’t go away, you won’t give up!

You probably have gotten the sense that we are really passionate about Guayusa? So, it wouldn't hurt us to back up why - here’s ten 10 reasons why we love this tea so much. We could list more - but, ten is a nice neat number. It’s also the exact amount of letters in ‘G.U.A.Y.U.S.A.T.E.A’ :)