The kids and I spent 3 days last week in the Southern Adirondacks. A family friend, who is quite an outdoorsman, and experienced birdwatcher, purchased about 40 acres a couple years ago near Hinckley Reservoir in upstate New York. He has been telling me that I need to come up for a visit, and we finally took him up on the offer. One thing that he mentioned in advance of the visit was that he wanted me to show him what was edible on his property. The next several posts will all be from that visit.
This is the first interview in a series of interviews called Tea Company Spotlight that I'd like to do with tea owners from all the tea companies around the world.
My first interview is with Mike Morton, the owner and founder of TeaFrog, founded in 2006 and based online out of Oakville, Ontario with distributors throughout Canada. I've spoken with Mike through reviewing many of his teas for the STeaP podcast since late 2007, and he was all too happy to answer a few questions about his company.
BRANDICE: Tell us a bit about starting your company.
MIKE: I have been a tea drinker for all of my life, and until about 4 years ago, the only tea I knew was Orange Pekoe Tetley Teabags. :) My daughter visited Japan in 2004 and the family that she stayed with sent back a gift package of good green tea. At the time I had no idea how to brew it, taste it, etc, and we could not even read the packaging because it was all in Japanese! We figured out how to make it eventually, and were surprised at how amazing it was compared to the teabag store bought that we had been drinking. As I started to research and explore tea, I grew a passion for finding good tea, and sharing what I knew with friends and family. As I grew evermore - lets say, *obsessed* with it, I started to notice that tea was getting more popular, but the outlets for different varieties and flavors for experimenting with were limited. I just naturally took what I knew about business from previous experience, paired it with a passion, and lo and behold, TeaFrog was born! :)
Chris Cason is Tavalon's tea sommelier, and in this clip, he explains out to create simple syrup infused with tea, which can then be turned into a tea soda that sounds really quite tasty! I'm looking forward to trying this out on my own at some point. Have any of you created a unique beverage with tea?
Are you a writer who also enjoys tea? There's a contest going on over at Felicitea that offers an opportunity to showcase your writing talents for free tea and other prizes. There's only about a week left, so don't waste any time if you read about the contest and want to participate!
Here's the overview, straight from Felicitea's site:
Write: We're looking for poetry, prose, whatever you like. Feel free to haiku or make up a limerick, or write out a concise little paragraph. Just write about tea and it's relationship to you, your friend, or your last cup of coffee.
We want to connect new drinkers to tea, convert a coffee drinker (or other non-tea drinking people) or two over (at least get them to try good tea!) and reconnect tea lovers with what it is they love about tea.
Tea drinkers it is your responsibility to help the coffee drinkers of the world. You are charged with helping them understand the joy of tea. If you are a convert tell your story. If you love tea, but still enjoy an occasional cup of coffee it's okay, but what about the tea keeps you coming back to the pot all day? Share with the Internets why they should kick that coffee habit. If you have a friend you're nominating, be specific.
Coffee/Non-tea drinkers this is your chance to tell us why you drink coffee (or something else) instead of tea. This is your chance to tell all us tea drinkers what it is that makes you go for the espresso instead of the Earl Grey. Did you have a bad tea bag experience? Convinced all green tea is bitter? Are you willing to give it a shot but don't know where to start?
For the detailed rules and the prizes, click to read on!
This recent post about Starbucks - as with most posts about Starbucks - caused the typical coffee cacophony over price and quality. Although I happen to like Starbucks just fine, I certainly appreciate a good homemade cup. Unfortunately, quality espresso machines are pricey and people rarely use them enough to meet their ROI ('Fess up: How many of you have a schmancy DeLonghi at home, but still go to Starbucks every day?). As a veteran barista (of both indie and corporate coffeehouses), I've come up with a stock of supplies to help make gourmet coffee at home.
Espresso drinks:
Moka pot (like this one from Bialetti): Many Italians still brew their espresso the old-fashioned way -- on the stovetop. The pot steeps espresso grounds in boiling water until the bubbles force the creamy coffee into the top of the Moka. Pour it out, and there's your shot.
Milk Frother (like this one from Aerolatte): This bad boy has a high-speed whisker that whips any kind of milk into foamy shape. (For a cappuccino, use half steamed milk/half foam; for a latte, use mainly steamed milk, with a layer of foam on top).
Over the past few summers, cherry-based cocktails have become something of a signature for me, to the point whereupon being proposed to in mid-July a few years back, I immediately began pulping and freezing cherries for use in our wedding cocktails the following October. Fresh cherries have a cruelly short season, and I do my best to make the most of every phase from sour to Rainier to Bing. Each has a distinct level of sweetness and depth of flavor and is complemented by different suites of ingredients. Rich, dark Bings stand up to wood smoking and full-bodied lemon and limeades, but tender, young sour cherries seem a natural fit for a subtly refreshing sweet iced tea. Oh - and booze.
Rishi took home seven first place awards at the recent World Tea Expo. They are definitely doing something right, and I personally recommend their Jade Cloud tea.
It turns out that the flavinoids in tea may actually help ease symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases, and there seems to the possibility that flavinoids in tea may help repair the damage, not just stop it.
Teaware geeks will enjoy this write up by MattCha about Korean style gimhae tea bowls, complete with a brief history of this teaware style and several pictures of some very nice bowls.
This is a great article on gongfu tea tables, with in-depth comparisons that you really won't find anywhere else. It's very cool of the author to share all the info collected while on his own quest for hte perfect gongfu tea table. Bookmark this one if you ever want to get into gongfu tea preparation!
When I first began to dabble in green tea, I absolutely hated it. It was bitter, drying to the mouth, wretched taste, and I was left for a long time feeling that green tea just wasn't for me. Many people I knew who drank black tea felt the same way, so I concluded that green tea was for the few who had the palette for it.
Of course, this was during a time when the only other tea drinkers I knew were buying Bigelow or Lipton bags and, like myself, just throwing them in some boiling hot water and coming back whenever we remembered to take the bag out, squeezing the bag thoroughly to get the last drops into the cup.
I shudder these days when I think about how badly I was scalding my first attempts at green tea, and I marvel that I enjoyed any tea at all, considering the way in which I was preparing it. This is a predicament many novice tea drinkers find themselves when it comes to anything other than black tea: you're scalding (and probably over-steeping it).
Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some sweet tea. He's a Southern boy by birth (Brooklynian by marriage), and having a big ol' pitcher easily grabbable in the fridge seems to right any Mason Dixon imbalance he might be suffering at the time. I've got it down to a science, proportion-wise, but this past weekend, his itch for a sugar fix kicked in while I was at the grocery store. What he made tasted divine, but there was just too much for one pitcher, and not enough refrigerator room for a second.
If nothing else, the nuns at St. Scorpacciata instilled in me the mortal fear of wasting food, and seeing how I'd been at the store to buy milk (which neither of us usually drink) for a Bolognese, I decided sherbet would be what saved our souls from eternal damnation. I suppose we won't know for a while if that worked, but it did taste pretty damned delicious.
In some sectors, it's practically de rigueur (and awfully hilarious) to rip on the rarefied findings of NY Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, but I've gotta say I tend to dig his indignation as expressed through the fewer-holds-barred medium of the website's Diner's Journal. I certainly jibe with his notions of the judiciously applied dress code and the diner's right to doggie bags, but I'm almost irrationally delighted by his use of the bully pulpit to call out the stealthy price jabbings of high-end restaurants.
He specifically cites the same outrageous charges (his boiling point is $7, mine was $6) for postprandial tea that I'd kvetched about a while back. Nothing falutin', not a monkey-harvested Pur-eh or shade-grown sencha -- just in his case a mint T-brand tea (which tea purists would prefer we refer to as a "tisane" rather than a tea as it's actually an herbal infusion, but I digress) which at $17.95 for 1.76 oz tin, retail, would surely produce, uh, more than 2.56 cups. Yes, service, water heating, cups, rent, etc. don't come for free but still, the whole enterprise is quite crabby-making in this strained economy.
Mr. Bruni, we salute your foray into the consumer advocacy front and will be following the "That Costs What?!?" series juuuust as soon as you get that pesky RSS tag fixed ravenously.
There are a lot of ways that tea blenders use rooibos (sometimes called "red tea") these days, whether it's in a straight herbal tea (tisane) or blended with real teas to add flavor to the blend. A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that one common way to describe its flavor is "sweet (without sugar added) and slightly nutty" and I find this to be true. Sometimes I find myself mistaking a rooibos flavor for adding vanilla in a blend, only slightest earthier.
What is rooibos? When I started STeaP with my co-host Joe, I asked the same question of Joe and was told that it's a tree bark, but have since learned that rooibos is a bush-like plant that belongs to the legume family. It's native to South Africa, specifically the Western Cape region. Rooibos is completely caffeine-free, so it's a healthy alternative for those who avoid caffeine.
Preparation of a straight rooibos is the same as that of a black tea (boiling water temperature, additives such as milk and sugar can add to the experience), and processing of the rooibos plant is also similar, involving oxidation (which is often inaccurately referred to by the tea world as "fermentation"). There is an unoxidized form of rooibos (commonly called "green rooibos" as opposed to red), but it's less commonly used and more expensive than the typical "red tea." When preparing a tea with rooibos, remember to keep in mind that rooibos is very, very fine and dust can often slip through tea balls and other infusers. Use a very fine mesh infuser to make your rooibos, such as the Finum brewing basket.
Rooibos is used by almost every tea company I frequent, many creating blends that focus on the rooibos as a primary component, while some add rooibos more as an added flavor to a traditional tea. I've seen very creative uses, such as rooibos chai, rooibos earl grey, and in South Africa, there is a company that has patented a red espresso. I personally recommend Adagio's Foxtrot tea (it's actually a tisane), which is my favorite way to enjoy rooibos. What's your favorite way to enjoy rooibos?
In continuing with the backyard wild teas, I can't let summer pass by without mentioning this wild lemonade substitute. Sumac grows like a weed in this country. It is a relative to the much hated poison sumac, but as the flowers give way to the fruit, you can't mistake this harmless, small tree for anything else.
The branches are fuzzy, hence the name of this variety. The fuzzy clusters of fruit are what we're after. Watch these from June through September and grab the red ones, as they ripen, but before the rain hits them and washes away the flavor. Soak a couple of clusters in a pitcher of ice-cold water in your refrigerator for one to two hours. Your taste buds will know how long. Keep the water cold to prevent bitterness. Strain the results through a fine strainer, or cloth, and serve sweetened. It has a very lemonade-like flavor.
Since these trees seem to grow almost anywhere, please be careful of pollutants and heavy traffic. I doubt anyone would be upset with you for over picking these giant weeds though. See you on the trail!
When getting into high quality tea, the options can be a bit overwhelming. You can read all the right information about tea preparation, teaware, and all the different types of tea, but knowing what flavors you like and what teas you'll lean toward is an ongoing process that can get pricey if you're buying high quality tea and buying it four or more ounces at a time (typical purchase quantities).
The answer to this dilemma is something that I have a lot of fun with: tea samples. They're relatively cheap (allowing for great varety for the same price), they're a small commitment (low guilt if you just pitch the ones you don't like), they don't take up a lot of space (I have a drawer full of them), and they're easy to mail (if you don't like a tea, cheap postage will send it on to another tea drinker!).
In fact, they're so convenient that I still buy samples of tea that I do like, because I drink through my tea supply slowly (due to the huge variety of tea I have) and the unopened packets stay fresh. I also frequently send samples of my favorite teas to friends (a bundle of tea samples makes a nice gift).
Mlive.com has some great tips for hosting a tea and garden party for children. From the kid-friendly peanut butter or cheese filling for finger sandwiches, to the cupcake decoration station and the small kid-sized gardening projects, this sounds exactly like something I would have loved as a child.
The article mentions having caffeine-free teas for children, and I think this is an excellent idea as well. When having a party for children, it's generally not a good idea to pump the kids full of anything that's going to very suddenly make life stressful for you as the host, and caffeine-free is usually a good policy for kids in general. Fruit or mint-flavored tisanes (herbal teas) would be an obvious choice for refreshing flavors that won't be too far outside a younger child's typical flavor palette
I also think that for kids, painting their own personalized tea cups at a place like Color Me Mine (most of you probably have a similar "paint your own pottery" studio in your local area) would make a tea party a lot of extra fun. Most kids love an art project, and then they can all drink their tea while showing off their one-of-a-kind painted tea cups. Keep in mind that the pottery takes time to complete after being painted, so remember to plan two separate afternoons: one for painting and one for drinking tea out the finished artwork.
A jar of honey can become a sticky mess. Next time you're adding honey to another dish or a mug of tea, use a honey dipper to prevent a thick gooey layer from spreading.
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Kind little rituals seem to go a long way toward making marriage work, so almost every weekend, I make my husband some 
In some sectors, it's practically de rigueur (and 
Chocolate-stuffed bananas on the grill
Tyler Florence welcomes new daughter
Beware kids' menus!
