The Peach Pop tea is a popular order at Cha Cha's Tea, a new tea lounge located in downtown Phoenix's Grand Avenue Arts District.
Patricia Escarcega
1325 Grand Avenue, #3
The menu at Cha Cha's Tea features popular "craft" tea drinks like a spiced chai latte, matcha green tea, and London Fog – a cozy blend of Earl Grey tea, lavender flowers, steamed milk, and vanilla. Cha Cha's also offers a traditional gong fu-style Chinese tea service using a Gaiwan tea set. The ritualized tea service provides multiple tea infusions and is said to help tea drinkers experience every layer of flavor. If you're a newer tea drinker looking for something simple and refreshing, owner Ashley Hoekstra recommends something like her homemade Peach Pop tea. Hoekstra says she plans to update the menu frequently to reflect the current season and the weather. This summer's iced tea menu includes drinks like Cactea, a cactus blossom tea made with rooibos (red tea). There's also Strawberry Sour, a strawberry-hibiscus iced tea, and Tangerine Sage, made using Sencha green tea, sage, and citrus.
Karma Apple's owner, Joanie Cady, wants people to feel safe ordering allergen-free food
Meagan Mastriani
7 East Palo Verde Street #2, Gilbert
At Karma Apple Juicery in Gilbert, customers eat with their eyes first. The menu includes a mouthwatering rainbow of visual delights like vivid fuchsia smoothies topped with tropical fruit slices, mint green matcha tarts with a sprinkling of gold and periwinkle flower petals, and spectrums of bottled juices in every jewel tone. Owner Joanie Cady's offerings are free of most common allergens. Karma Apple offers 14 kinds of Superfood Smoothies and six varieties of Adaptogenic Lattes, served hot or iced. These beverages have herbs, mushrooms, or root powders that are supposed to aid the immune system. Cady's juices are squeezed in a cold press rather than ground up in a centrifugal juicer. It takes more time to make juice this way, but it has a higher nutritional value. Cold-pressing is why Karma Apple’s juices have such deep, rich coloration, like the emerald green of kale and the blazing orange of carrot.
Meagan Mastriani
6501 East Greenway Parkway, #152, Scottsdale
Wow Wow Hawaiian Lemonade – now open in Scottsdale and coming soon to Ahwatukee, Glendale, and Gilbert — offers roughly 35 different flavors of raw, cold-pressed lemonades and limeades. There are the standards, such as classic all-lemon, strawberry mint, and watermelon basil. Each can be ordered iced or frozen. Then there are sparkling varieties, including the crisp and sugary mojito limeade, made with coconut water and sweetened with agave or local honey. Lastly, there are “life” lemonades, which seem to offer health benefits with additions like cayenne, turmeric, and charcoal. Iced teas, cold brew coffee, and rotating kombuchas on tap are also available. The shop itself has an easygoing island vibe, complete with surf videos on loop, a dog-friendly patio, and leafy plants nestled all over. It's an ideal place to chill and binge on healthy-ish treats with friends or family.
Peach Cobbler, a recent entry in Wren House's newly launched Las Frescas.
Chris Malloy
2125 North 24th Street
Wren House Brewing's head brewer, Preston Thoeny, has produced a fresh stunner: A sour beer series called Las Frescas. Sour beer is a sprawling beer style that spans from gently tart brews like Berliner weisse to ferociously puckering lambics and wild ales. Las Frescas starts with a sour beer base on the milder end, with Wren House’s take on Berliner weisse. Thoeny spikes this base with fruit solids and juice, creating a beer that is part beer, part sangria-like infusion, part nectar. “The original idea was it would be kind of reminiscent of those iced Mexican beverages, like agua frescas – more juice-based, super-palatable beers for the summertime,” Thoeny says.
