I Want to Buy You a Cup of Plum Deluxe Tea

Happy Tea Tuesday and welcome to An Opportune Moment’s first ever giveaway!

This post comes to you in 3 parts:

Part the 1st

I want to talk about customer service (Or, why I’m having a giveaway)

By now, I think you’ve all heard about the fire that destroyed my apartment and most of my possessions, including my elaborate collection of teas and tea accoutrements. Someday, I will write a blog post that doesn’t link back to that event, but today is not that day!

Anyway, I am a sporadic twitter user at best and, back in November, I happened to sign in and see that Plum Deluxe (a lovely lifestyle blog I follow) had launched a line of teas and was looking for bloggers to help promote this new endeavor. I messaged Andy Hayes (founder of Plum Deluxe, tea blender extraordinaire, and genuinely nice dude) saying I was interested in working with him, and he sent me an email that opened with, “WOW, I was really moved by your fire story” and went on to offer me any kind of tea I wanted from the Plum Deluxe store to help me rebuild my collection, free of charge.

Although I am now blogging about the experience (months later), he didn’t offer me tea on the condition that I have a certain number of blog followers and/or promise to write about his product. He simply offered me an excellent customer service experience.

A few weeks before the fire, E bought a new water bottle from contigo — a company that makes high quality products. I’m talking $20 for a water bottle, which he got to use for about a week before he lost it in the fire. E decided to send contigo an email explaining what happened and wondering what they could do. Not only did E hear back, but a customer service representative offered him a more expensive water bottle free of charge because the one he had originally purchased was out of stock.

For Christmas, I asked E for a travel mug from contigo, which I love and recommend wholeheartedly. My point is that good customer service means something! E and I are loyal contigo customers and I want to buy you a cup of Plum Deluxe tea not only because I like these products but because I like the companies behind them.

Part the 2nd

I want to talk about about tea (Or, what I’m giving away)

I have tried two different teas from Plum Deluxe — the Full Moon Chai, which is still available in their store, and the Black Magic: Vanilla Rose Tea, which was the tea of the month back in November.

Guys, if you’re into flavored teas, you’re going to love these.

The Full Moon Chai is more chai-inspired than chai tea. For starters, the base is rooibos (an herbal tea), not black tea, and then a close inspection of the ingredients reveals more fruits and flowers than in a typical chai spice mix. Apples, rosehips, raspberries, and hibiscus join more traditional chai ingredients such as cardamom, cinnamon, and ginger. The resulting flavor is very autumnal, with cinnamon and cardamom at the forefront as well as orange, apple, and hibiscus. It sounds almost like a kitchen sink tea, but the ingredients come together quite nicely.

I feel bad telling you how great the Black Magic blend is since it’s not available anymore, but hopefully it will help illustrate how well this brand does flavored black teas. Black Magic is a solid black tea, and you can definitely taste both the vanilla and the rose. E doesn’t generally like rose-flavored things and he still thought this was delicious, so the floral notes aren’t overpowering. This tastes like an afternoon tea to me, like it would pair well with finger sandwiches and mini cakes. It’s decadent, but it’s not dessert. I also think it would make a great tea latte, so, I’ll let you know when I get a new milk frother and try that out.

Part the 3rd

I want to buy you a cuppa (Or, how to enter the giveaway)

This is going to be a pretty low-key giveaway. I’m not using any fancy tools to help me choose a winner or count down until the contest is over. Plum Deluxe isn’t even donating the tea for this giveaway. I am literally going to buy one of you a cup of tea because I like this product and I want this company to succeed.

So, if you want to enter, you should follow this link to to the Plum Deluxe tea shop and decide which tea you would most like to try. Come back to this post and leave a comment telling me your choice. Next Tuesday (February 17th), I will put the name of everyone who comments into a hat and draw one of you randomly. Then, I’m going to email the winner asking for their address and buy them a package of the tea they mentioned in their comment. Because Plum Deluxe only ships to the US and Canada, this giveaway is going to be limited to those two countries. Sorry international readers, y’all are great and I promise my next giveaway will include you.

Sound good? Leave a comment if you think so!