Back in the time before COVID…… There was an ad in a shop window for the 2019 Northwest Tea Festival. I like tea, and I’m not opposed to festivals, and I’d never heard of a tea festival before, so on the appropriate weekend I found my way to the location and proceeded to try and drink my way through the offerings. There were lots of good teas, some really great teas, some fun seminars, and yet more tea. I was starting to get a touch overwhelmed when I turned the corner of a row of vendors and was offered an intriguingly dark and full bodied, yet sprightly and nuanced, beverage the likes of which I hadn’t come across before. There was something about it, and then I realized – the combinations in this beverage reminded me on an overall sensory level of walking in a moist Pacific Northwest forest as it was drying out after a soaking rain.
And so I was introduced to the somewhat atypical tea blends by Friday Afternoon teas in Wallingford. Guided by the owner’s lexical-gustatory synesthesia – an ability to essentially experience words and ideas as tastes – they create tea and tisane blends along a range of themes. The blend which pulled me in, for example, was based on the taste perception of the Direwolves in “Game of Thrones” and includes components such as sage and elderflowers in addition to actual tea. Enthralled as I was at the time of the festival, I bought several different varieties and found that my appreciation of them didn’t fade as time went on. When COVID hit and I found myself sheltering in place in a more distant location for several months, once they re-opened I ordered a selection to keep me company in my absence.
While shopping on their webpage, I came across the information that the owner offers custom blending services. That sounded interesting to me, so I tucked it away in the back of my head. A few weeks ago we had the first autumnal day of the year, and I found myself unable to decide on what tea I wanted to enjoy the upcoming season with – and thought about doing a custom blend. I set up an appointment and tried to anticipate what the heck I was getting myself into. As part of the appointment setup, there is a field to provide anything you think might be useful for them to know prior to the actual session. Not having a clue what I was about to do, I put some words together in a stream-of-consciousness format and hit send.
A few days later I arrived at the tea shop and met Friday, the shop’s owner and blender. They had set up an area for appropriately socially distanced interaction, and after talking for a few minutes about what I was looking for she developed an initial flavor profile and set about talking me through what she was coming up with and getting my input on what direction I wanted to take. Once we had a basic plan in place she headed over to the raw material storage area and created a blend, then brought a sample infusion over for us to try, and then take our combined feedback and tweak things and repeat the process. It was a fascinating and educational experience to both see and taste how small changes in ratios among several components could alter the end product. With a few minor directional changes and some refinements we eventually hit on a “production version” which incorporated some components I would have never come up with alongside some old favorites, which I was quite frankly surprised made their appearance as I hadn’t mentioned anything about them.
All told it was a very fun way to spend an hour learning more about various teas and herbal ingredients as well as a bit of the art of blending, and included just a smidge of tea magic – that thing that happens when you taste something unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered but it talks to you in just the right way.
rurikia 