Treat yourself to warm drinks that nourish, indulge, and brighten your senses.
Gaia Golden Milk
You may know golden milk from its recent moment in the sun, but the history of the traditional Indian beverage begins centuries before its trend in the West. According to Ayurvedic philosophy, ojas is the energy of life, the essence of the body’s vitality. Golden milk—typically made with turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, black pepper, sweetener, and warm milk—is an ancient tonic considered to build ojas and balance the body.
Gaia’s Golden Milk preserves the warming, inflammation-taming qualities of the traditional turmeric tonic, but simplifies the recipe with a convenient powdered blend of turmeric, vanilla, black pepper, dates, and ashwagandha, a popular adaptogenic herb that relieves stress and soothes the nervous system.
$21 for 4.3 oz, Garner’s Natural Life, 27 S. Pleasantburg Dr, #20, Greenville. garnersnaturallife.com
Lumineux Drinking Chocolate
If your most formative hot chocolate experiences started with Swiss and ended with Miss, you have indeed missed out. At least that’s what you’ll realize after the first luxurious sip of Lumineux’s drinking chocolate.
Crafted in small batches by a European-style chocolate maker, the powdered drinking-chocolate mix levels up hot cocoa into heavenly places. Smooth and velvety when stirred into warm milk, with a hint of bitterness from the dark chocolate, this is a hot cocoa intended for chocolate purists. The chocolate is 73% Madagascar dark chocolate from the Sambriano Valley, a lovely expression of Lumineux’s mission to showcase the unique terroir of under-appreciated cocoa beans from Africa and Asia.
$10 for 6 oz, lumineuxchocolate.com
AppalaChai! Chai
Sometimes the best things come to us by way of a detour—in this case, a traditional Indian chai recipe by way of Black Mountain, where chai brewers Katie Amies, Tommy Winant, and Joel Boyle produce their small-batch, fresh chai concentrate. Inspired by a recipe learned during Tommy’s travels, the AppalaChai! team tinkered with different micro-batches of the warm spiced tea before landing on their own complex version that offers a deeply flavorful, incredibly smooth chai drinking experience.
AppalaChai! concentrate is intentionally brewed with a bit less sweetener than is standard so that the ingredients—all organic and sourced as locally as possible—can truly shine.
$9 for 32 oz, Swamp Rabbit Cafe & Grocery, 205 Cedar Lane Rd, Greenville. appalachai.com
Photograph by Jivan Davé
