I’ll be the first to admit—most days, I’m much more a coffee person than a matcha tea person. But, like being a cat person or a dog person, preferring one doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the other. I look to coffee most mornings to help those synapses along in the whole firing + functioning thing, but there’s nothing like a soothing, gentle cup of warm tea when you’re looking for that cozy unwind on a chilly evening or sitting out on your porch taking in the slow, early morning awakening of the rest of the world and not quite looking for the shock-to-life coffee often gives.
So, tea, for me, is more of a luxury; something I don’t have often but, when I do, something that I truly appreciate in a way I don’t think I would if it were everyday for me.
One interesting tea company we discovered early this year and revived some excitement in tea for us is Adventure Tea, who pairs a uniquely captivating product with an organically storied backdrop and wonderful hand-done packaging artwork. As they put it:
“We spent most of our lives seeking awesome experiences to offset the awful experience of our 8-6 jobs (whatever happened to 9-5, anyway?)…. Finally, it hit us: the glowing computer screens, tightly clenched steering wheels and rampant aspirin abuse were the polar opposite of what we wanted our lives to be. We wanted to explore, to create, to seek what the modern world insists is a child’s fantasy.
Just as adventure is created through exploration, memories are built at the dinner table. Our best experiences centered on the joy of sharing food and drink with other people, whether they hail from next door or across the planet. We wanted to create something that could unite people from around the globe in their innate desire to experience the exotic, and tea was the obvious choice. For millennia tea has been the favorite drink of emperors and explorers, poets and farmers; it is the culinary common denominator that all of humanity has always agreed upon. Tea has started revolutions, catalyzed the exploration of the deepest corners of the globe, made and lost massive fortunes, and inspired some of the world’s greatest minds. Perhaps we love tea because when we drink it we can sense the thousands of years of cultural, geographic, and historical identity condensed into each leaf. Or maybe it just tastes good. Fueled by a few dozen cups of Guayusa, we ditched our dead-end jobs and launched Adventure Tea out of a 700 square-foot bungalow in West Los Angeles. Our mission: to bring the exotic to your tea cup, spark a little adventure in your life, and resurrect the identity of a beverage dominated for too long by passionless mega-corporations.”
Again, I’m no expert on tea—at all, really—but the teas we’ve had from Adventure Tea really do seem to tell a story all on their own when you take the time to step away from the hectic nature of your daily life and listen. Along with tasting notes, each tea comes with a backstory as to how the company founders discovered the tea and what makes it special for them.
They also come packed in these lovely little wooden boxes with sliding lids and really well-done handmade artwork specific to each locale (done by the wife of the the husband-and-wife founders we’re told).
Plus you can hide your weed in the used up boxes. Obviously.
So, next time life’s giving you the run-around, as it does us all, and you’re ready to scream, step away, assure yourself that this seemingly insurmountable problem will be there when you get back, and take some time to brew up + enjoy some tea, says this coffee-drinker. My bet is that things will look a little more surmountable when you take a second look.
