Let’s talk about flavors, our raison d’etre. How do we come up with flavors? How do we know what will be good?
I will let you all in on a little secret I hold near and dear to my heart. The best way to come up with good tea blends is first to come up with bad tea blends.
The more bad blends you consume and create, the more you will refine your palate and add to the repertoire of flavors which you pull from and reference. Sommeliers will lick dirt, not because it’s an odd flex, but because they now have a base point for earthiness. If you wish to understand the adjective “woody”, I implore you to go and chew on some dried wood, or wash, then lick a penny.
We created our blends for the sake of whole natural flavors. The blends consist of a few ingredients in order to showcase the balance of each component and how it commingles and is expressed in hot water. When I worked as a chef, the goal was to create a unique harmony with the raw materials you had been presented with.
A few black bags and our Black Bear Tea was born out of a desire to share the bright floral notes of blueberries grown here in Northern Michigan. Our area is naturally sandy and leans towards acidic. The rows and rows of bushes at Blueberry Hill can vary from bush to bush–even from branch to branch. Our spring was a bit turbulent, so berries ripened in pairs and small clusters rather than whole branches at a time. It made it more difficult to gather large amounts of berries, however, we took more care and attention to peering behind each leaf to pick the ripest berries.
The weather this coming spring will let us know how next year’s blends of Black Bear Tea will taste. Will it be more tart? More sweet? Will their floralness or their fruitiness shine brighter? Having now consumed a modest several pounds of blueberries last picking season, I will tell you even though each berry might be different, all together, they blend to create some of our best signature teas.