#109 – Meagan Francis Spills the Tea: History, Sourcing, and Brewing a Good Cup

George Orwell writes, “If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilization … but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.” In this episode I got to sit down with Meagan Francis, a supporter and friend of Ancestral Kitchen and veteran podcaster herself. She is the host of The Kettle with Meagan Francis, which is a lovely podcast, and author of “The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read” which just came out this spring. Meagan also owns a tea and variety shop and in this episode she shared with me some surprising and interesting tidbits on the history of tea and how it was introduced to Western civilization, some of the finer points of sourcing and brewing, where some of our familiar tea traditions came from and what High Tea really means.

We had so much to talk about that we overflowed into an Aftershow which will be available on Kitchen Table Chats, our private podcast of bonus episodes for podcast supporters. As a thank you to our podcast supporters for keeping us on the air, Alison also created a new recipe for Spelt Buttermilk and Honey Scones, which is available where supporters can log in to the podcast downloads section of our website. Sorry Orwell, no violent disputes broke out today, but I learned a lot. Pour yourself a hot cup of brew – whether you’re doing the dishes or just gazing across the lonely windswept moors as you listen – and let’s get into it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

What we cover:

• Meagan’s new book!
• Alison’s Sourdough Starter course (with code for FREE purchase)
• A brief history of tea and how it came to the Western world
• What is the difference between black, green, oolong, white tea and more
• What about herbal tea?
• What about local, free-trade and organic concerns for tea?
• The truth about tea bags (and the surprising history!)
• Best ways to prepare tea at home?
• Steeping and straining tea

In the aftershow available on the private podcast feed for podcast supporters, Meagan and Andrea chatted further about tea and tradition, discussing Orwell’s Essay about A Nice Cup of Tea, caffeinated and decaffeinated tea and how to brew a low-caff cup at home without chemicals, why Americans are challenged by traditions and more.

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Meagan’s Website

Meagan’s Shop and Tea Tips

Meagan’s Podcast, The Kettle with Meagan Francis

Meagan’s new book, The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read

Link to Alison’s course 10 Tips for Creating & Maintaining a Sourdough Starter – Use code STARTER100 to get the course for FREE!

Too Many Eggs by Mimi Dvorak-Smith

Free PDF of the book

Infused: Adventures in Tea, by Henrietta Lovell

The Tea Cyclopedia: All You Ever Wanted to Know about the World’s Favorite Drink, by Keith Souter

Where Meagan got her Camellia sinensis tree

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Transcript:

Andrea:
George Orwell writes, If you look up tea in the first cookery book that comes to hand, you will probably find that it is unmentioned. Or at most, you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the mainstays of civilization, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes. In this episode, I got to sit down with Megan Francis, a supporter and friend of Ancestral Kitchen and veteran podcaster herself. She is the host of The Kettle with Megan Francis, which is a lovely podcast, and author of The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read, which just came out this spring. Megan also owns a tea and variety shop, and in this episode, she shared with me some surprising and interesting tidbits on the history of tea and how it was introduced to Western civilization, some of the finer points of sourcing and brewing, where some of our familiar tea traditions came from, and what high tea really means. We had so much to talk about that we overflowed into an after show which will be available on Kitchen Table Chats, our private podcast of bonus episodes for podcast supporters.

Andrea:
As a thank you to our podcast supporters for keeping us on the air, Allison also created a new recipe for spelt, buttermilk, and honey scones, which is available where supporters can log in to the podcast downloads section of our website. Sorry, Orwell, no violent disputes broke out today, but I learned a lot. Pour yourself a hot cup of brew, whether you’re doing the dishes or just gazing across the lonely windswept moors as you listen. And let’s get into it. Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. I’m Alison, a European town dweller living in England. And I’m Andrea, living on a family farm in Northwest Washington State, USA. Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking, and living with ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
Music

Andrea:
Hello, and good morning, Megan.

Meagan:
Hello, Andrea.

Andrea:
It’s not Allison today. No British accent on this episode.

Meagan:
Oh, that’s so sad. That’s what I listen to Ancestral Kitchen podcast for. It’s the British accent.

Andrea:
I know. Me too. It’s why I talk to Allison. Okay, it’s at least a perk.

Meagan:
It’s at least a perk. Well, we’re going to be talking about something that’s very British today, even though we’re not doing it in a British accent. And I’m not even going to try because you two both know that one time I tried to do a Cockney accent.

Andrea:
Remember I said to you? You know what? That was very entertaining. That was awesome. And then you did it like six times differently.

Meagan:
Yes, I couldn’t get it. It sounded kind of like I was from Boston. It was just getting really off the rails.

Andrea:
It was like… Like fusion accent.

Meagan:
Exactly.

Andrea:
Let me explain to people who you are in case they don’t know. So Megan is the host of The Kettle with Megan Francis, which is a podcast that Allison and I listen to. And Allison has been on, actually. She has. Megan, I don’t know how you’ve met, you’re gonna have to say how you found us, but Megan was a patron of our podcast. And then we found out that she has been podcasting for many years and had much advice. And now you’ve given us. I mean, you have changed our game. I wasn’t going to specify. I’m just kidding. Yes, you have streamlined and simplified things for us and helped us in so many ways. I feel like it has been the most magnificent blessing we didn’t know we wanted.

Meagan:
Well, I love that. As an unofficial podcast consultant, my first philosophy is always to do no harm. But sometimes that doesn’t work out. I found you two through the what have we done to beer episode, which is kind of funny because I don’t really consider myself a big beer enthusiast. I don’t really remember why. I think I was listening to a lot of Homestead and Homestead adjacent podcasts at the time, and yours must have come up. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. And then I listened and was very, was hooked because you had such an interesting, I don’t know, just, you’re a little bit different than the other food podcasts that were out there that had kind of come across my, across my ear balls. And, um, I just loved, like, I loved the, the way the two of you broke these topics down. The level of nerdery spoke deeply to me and, um, the history involved in the context that you put everything in. I thought it was great. So that was sort of my first initiation. And then I got really into listening to Allison talk about oats. I have a very clear memory actually of taking myself on a little date last year where I went on a hike and I listened to the episode about Allison talking about fermenting oats.

Andrea:
Yes. Very good one. And then I

Meagan:
Started fermenting my oats and then it all just spiraled from there. You know how it happened.

Andrea:
You fell into the rabbit hole. I did. You know, I said to somebody once, I never really thought of myself as somebody who has hyperfocuses. And she said, you have an entire podcast about hyperfocuses.

Meagan:
It just legitimizes your hyperfocus, right?

Andrea:
Yeah. Gives me a good reason. Well, you are an amazing podcaster yourself, and we have really enjoyed learning from you. So I appreciate all that. And I should say, you have the kettle, but you’ve had multiple podcasts.

Meagan:
Yeah, the kettle’s pretty new, and that’s a solo project for me. I’ve had a podcast with a friend called The Mom Hour for 10 years. And then prior to that, my very first podcast was called The Kitchen Hour. I did it in 2012. And the whole point of the podcast was to give moms something to do while they were in the kitchen. Like to give them someone to talk them through it because i was sort of i had five little kids at the time i still have five kids but they’re big but at the time i had a very busy household that i was trying to get dinner and i was really trying to get better about cooking at home and spending time in the kitchen and i found that i just had to like make it make a point of hanging out there i had to become friends with my kitchen and so when i had something to kind of keep me company and not to feel like I was, I don’t know, tucked away in the back of the house while everybody else was doing something in some other part of the house, I really started to enjoy it. Now I really love hiding in the kitchen. Isn’t that funny?

Meagan:
Like when you don’t have skills or confidence, it’s really hard to enjoy something. And then when you start to get better at it and you become more confident, then it becomes fun. And I think I was trying to help moms at the time bridge that gap. Now, the funny thing is I knew nothing about podcasting and podcasting was still pretty new in 2012. And I would get emails from people who would say, is it okay if I listen while I’m holding laundry? And then I thought, okay, maybe this name is a little too, Like they’re taking the directive a little, they’re taking it too literally. So, um, anyway, from there, the mom hours was born. Yeah. So, and before that, I’ve been a writer for a long time. I’ve been a parenting writer. Um, I’ve been a freelancer for lots of different outlets. And now I’m in this stage of life where my kids are getting older and I’m getting really into tea. So there you go.

Andrea:
Well, that also, I have your book in front of me in the e-form, since the actual published one hasn’t even come out yet. Will it be out? Wait, it comes out April 6th.

Meagan:
It’ll have been out by the time. Okay.

Andrea:
So it’ll be out when this comes out. Yeah, I think so. So this book will actually be out, but you wrote a book that you called The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read. Yes. I have been browsing through this book and because I already like the way you talk and because I already like your thoughts. I mean, we see you in Discord. You’re the one who posts things. That gets everybody all like long message replying. Then I already know that I’m so excited to read it.

Meagan:
Well, it is a book that has been 27 years in the making because my oldest is 27 and my youngest is 16. so I’ve got five. So they, there are some ages in between. I honestly, one of them just had a birthday and that throws the whole thing off. Like I can rattle off their ages. Yeah. And then one has a birthday. I’m like, nevermind. I don’t know. They’re all in there between 16 and 27.

Meagan:
And, um, this, I’ve been a parenting writer and a podcaster for a long time. And this was sort of the book where I took a big look back at all of it and was like, here’s what I did. Here’s all the feelings I have about that. And then here’s what’s next. And here’s all the feelings I have about that. And so it’s kind of like a how-to book hidden in a memoir, I would say, because, publishers really like books to have tips and lists and things that you can do and actionable items and all of that. So there is some of that, but there’s so much else in there. It’s really like a collection of essays. And it’s really about the feelings that we have as moms, like the regrets and the things we’re proud of and the things that we wish we’d done differently and how now there’s, there comes a point where there’s no, there’s no do-overs ever, but there comes a point where you can’t even necessarily fix it as you go because it’s done. And what do you do with that? You know, what do you do with that information and that knowledge? And then what do you, what’s next? Like we often have been in a really intense, um.

Meagan:
A really intense period of life where our kids’ needs come first. And I know that the transition out of that can hit us in all kinds of different ways. So that’s really what this book is about. And for me, it’s all tea and chickens. A friend of mine said she thinks I’m in my tea and chickens era right now. And I was like, I love it. I’m happy to be there.

Andrea:
Hey, we don’t say no to that. Exactly. Can I read a passage from your book that just kind of, I liked it. It kind of cracked me up a little Yeah,

Meagan:
Go for it.

Andrea:
It says, you said, the author says, I’ve long protested our cultural insistence that parenthood is a job. It may be the hardest work we’ll ever do, but in what paid job does the employee handbook change from day to day with no warning? In what career do you work around the clock with no benefits? If this is a job, I’d like my 27-year performance review and promotion, please.

Meagan:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, I’ve kind of been having this conversation for some reason in various circles right now. My kids are still young. The oldest is 12 and the youngest is not yet one. And so I’m still in that kind of stage you were describing.

Meagan:
Yes. Hands full of on call every minute.

Andrea:
Yeah. And I think early on when I had my first, the best thing that ever happened to me was I have a lot of close friends who had kids who were much older than mine. you know, teenagers to moving out stage. And they really helped me with the perspective because I think sometimes just the sheer fact that there’s the diapers and the laundry and the dishes never stop and everybody’s asking and they’re needing and we homeschool also, you know how that goes. And so there’s that, you know, there’s no, you know, they’re gone at school. I’m going to go to the gym and have a minute. Like there’s none of that. And having somebody say, my goodness, You know, my last one just moved out. You know, what I wouldn’t give for those years again, just helps kind of keep my head straight. I think. Yeah.

Meagan:
There’s something so singularly special about the time that you’re in right now. And I, I knew it when I was in it, but you can know it and still kind of wish it was over a little bit, you know?

Andrea:
Right, right.

Meagan:
Yeah. And, um, there’s another chapter in the book where I talk about, like, there are things you won’t remember later. We think that if we just appreciate it hard enough that we can somehow make it last longer or preserve it or stop time or somehow be better moms. And I think you appreciate because it makes that moment better, but not because it’s going to change anything on the other side. There’s still going to be things that you forget and it’s still going to go by really fast. And you can’t stop that from happening.

Andrea:
Nothing you can do about it.

Meagan:
No, there’s nothing you can do about it. Time takes on. Yeah, yeah, it sure does. So I love the stage that I’m in now too, but I do look back at that time of little babies and small kids and I’m like, man, it’s sort of like, how did I do it and what I wouldn’t do to do it again? But maybe not all over again, you know?

Andrea:
Yeah, maybe not all over.

Meagan:
I’ll just take a day here and there. How about that?

Andrea:
Well, I’m excited for the cover reveal and the book does look beautiful. I’ll tell your publisher that it does look beautiful. So I’m excited. Um, well then let me ask you, I guess, uh, what’s the last thing you ate?

Meagan:
Well, um, the last thing I ate, what, oh my gosh, it was hours ago now because today got, I ate breakfast earlier than I usually would. And then I had a few little things I had to do. So, um, I had, today’s been weird. You already know that. It has been a little bit weird. We had a little time zone snafu. It happens. It happens.

Andrea:
I had an Andrea math problem.

Meagan:
I’ve done the exact same thing multiple times, so I cannot blame you. But anyway, I had egg casserole and a piece of sourdough.

Andrea:
What’s egg casserole? And were these eggs from the chickens as seen in your published works?

Meagan:
Yes, as seen in my published works, my little flock. I suddenly have an abundance of eggs. I know this is no surprise to anybody who has chickens.

Andrea:
Happy Easter.

Meagan:
This is my third year with chickens and it does catch me by surprise. Because it really, I feel like it ramps up very slowly and then suddenly, you know, you get a little bit behind. You still have a big family at home, so maybe this isn’t happening to you. But here, it’s just my husband and I and one teenage girl who doesn’t eat eggs every single day. So it’s like over the winter months, I was getting a handful of eggs. They did lay all winter, but not a lot. Maybe one every other day, something like that. So I wasn’t getting a lot of eggs. And then slowly that goes, it goes from one every other day to one every day. And then it’s two every day. And then we start to get behind and you get a little bit more behind. And then suddenly I look at the bowl where I put the eggs. I’m like, oh my gosh, they’re starting to roll off the top. And yes, the chicken math. So I decided this is the time I need to be operating in quantities of eggs. And so an egg casserole is a great way to use a quantity of eggs. And I think you recommended that book, Too Many Eggs, at some point. I have that book on my computer. I mean, the recipe I made was not anything special. It’s just like you put vegetables and garlic in a casserole.

Andrea:
It’s a standard one.

Meagan:
But I am now eyeballing that book with maybe thinking I’ll try some more adventurous.

Andrea:
Oh, my gosh, yes. There’s some fun stuff in that book. I’ll put it in the show notes because for anybody wondering, there’s a chicken lover out here in Washington State, and she wrote a book called Too Many Eggs, and she self-published it. And sells the copies herself because every publisher she went to wanted her to cut it down by like 800 recipes. And she was like, no. The whole point is that it’s a lot of recipes. So she said, fine, I’ll publish it myself. But she also wanted everybody who had too many eggs to be able to use it. So she made the PDF available for free on the website, which is so generous.

Meagan:
It is very, very generous. And you can donate to her, to the cause, if you’d like through her site, which I did.

Andrea:
Yeah, and she actually, she sells the book. It’s a kind of expensive book.

Meagan:
I would like to purchase actually a hard copy of it because PDFs have their limitations.

Andrea:
Yes. And she said the book, she sells it for exactly what it cost her to print it. Like she doesn’t actually make any money on it. She’s like, she just sells it for what she, it’s a lot. And it is really well printed. Like it is gorgeous. It’s like a very nice glossy.

Meagan:
Yeah, it’s beautiful. The PDF has fun illustrations. It’s great. And then I wanted to tell you about my sourdough bread because this feels like a big win for me. So I told in a recent Discord thread, I shared that up until last summer, I had never baked sourdough. In fact, I maybe had only baked bread at all from like a yeast packet a handful of times in my life. This was not something that I did regularly. I think I had a bread machine back when bread machines were so hot. Remember that?

Andrea:
They were the thing.

Meagan:
They were the thing. Yeah, I remember. I’m sure they still exist, but I remember. It was kind of like the Instant Pot of the 90s.

Andrea:
I think they’re getting hot again, actually.

Meagan:
Are they? Okay. Well, I hadn’t made it. My sister-in-law was making it. She kind of walked me through it. Now, she’s much more… Methodical, I’m going to say. My sister-in-law, Jenna, she’s a math and science person. She’s great at following directions. I am chaos and not great at that. So I was a little intimidated, but then when she showed it, because I always thought baking had to be so precise. That’s why I never thought of myself as a baker. Because I’m like just in the kitchen flinging flour around and stuff like that and seeing what happens. But I’ve actually found sourdough to be a lot more intuitive and a lot more like you learn it by hand, sort of, than I was really expecting. And so anyway, I’ve been working on this recipe. I’m not working on a recipe. I used the same recipe to make a spelt bread, to make a spelt loaf. And then my husband, who knows just enough to be dangerous about things that he’s not actually doing, he’s like, well, why don’t you make me an einkorn? And I was like, honey, but I’m doing this other thing now and I’m getting good at it. So can I just keep doing that? I kept bringing up einkorn because he read someplace that it was, I don’t know. I actually think I like a little bit better, but I made an einkorn loaf and that went pretty well. And then yesterday when I went to put the spelt, you know, on the scale, or sorry, the einkorn on the scale, I realized I was a little bit short and I would have had to go to the basement to get more. And I didn’t really want to do that.

Andrea:
Oh no, not the basement. Not the basement.

Meagan:
So I threw, so I made up the rest of the weight in spelt. So I had, it was probably about an, I’m going to say 75, 25, maybe 80, 20. It was mostly einkorn, but it worked out great because it gave it just a little more of the dough texture that I like to work with.

Andrea:
Yeah. There’d be a little more lift, right? Yes. With the spelt.

Meagan:
Yeah. And it held together so I could stretch and fold a little bit better. I really like how it turned out. So I’m pretty proud that I just sort of improvised and made it happen. Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, and the time you had spent practicing that kind of got you there. Actually, on sourdough, I wanted to read— Allison has this course, and somebody was just telling me the other day— actually, multiple people have told me in the past week, I think. I started making sourdough bread. I’ve not made bread before my life, or we haven’t bought bread in two years, or something. Different people have been talking about bread. Shout out to Julie, if you’re listening to this. She also said that she started listening to the podcast and she hasn’t made or bought bread in two years now. She’s been making her own at home. But Allison wrote this course called 10 Tips for Creating and Maintaining a Sourdough Starter. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, Megan, but it’s hosted at the Fermentation School.

Meagan:
Yes. Yeah.

Andrea:
It’s such a good… I told Allison, because I watched the course, obviously, and I told her, I… I’ve been making sourdough bread forever, and I learned so much with just little things that I listen to draw, little nuggets. So it’s a $5 course, but you can actually get it for free with the code STARTER100 at checkout, and I’ll put that in the show notes. But this is what Sonia said. She said the review is called Helpful and Encouraging, which is exactly how I would describe it. She said, when I first tried to create my own sourdough starter several years ago, I was very disappointed after almost a year of constant daily care. Anything I made using the starter had a less than desirable flavor. I eventually gave up on it, but just recently resurrected my desire to try again. Allison’s tips are invaluable, and I’ve quickly learned from my previous mistakes and can relax in the knowledge shared in this course and enjoy delicious sourdough on my schedule.

Meagan:
That is a great tip.

Andrea:
Yeah, well, my friend Jess just said the other day, too, she was like, these tips, like storing and being able to put it in the fridge and things, just like it changed my life.

Meagan:
It’s nice to have it all concentrated in one place, like all of those tips and ideas pulled together, because otherwise it can feel like a lot of jumping around the internet, finding that everyone has a slightly different idea, you know?

Andrea:
Have you run into this, Megan, where you see people who they don’t really know what they’re talking about, but they’re talking about it?

Meagan:
But also, if you know even less, then you don’t know that they don’t know. That’s the other thing. Exactly.

Andrea:
You have no way of knowing. That’s the thing. I feel like there’s so many misleading things about, you know, sourdough and stuff out there. And what you really want is someone like, like Allison has, she’s made all their bread for over a decade. Right. And she’s used exclusively ancient grains. Like you want somebody to talk about ancient grains, go listen to Allison. Like she knows them.

Meagan:
The thing I really had a hard time with when I first started looking for recipes, and I do have, I have several of Allison’s. I mean, like her stuff is always really good. But you would just, I would jump on and start kind of poking around, just looking for something. And I would put in like these search terms that I would think were so specific. Like, I don’t know, something like overnight, blah, blah, blah. And then I would look at it and be like, but this is just a white loaf. And yes, the photo is beautiful, but it’s not that hard to make a beautiful white loaf. That’s not what I’m looking for. No, it’s not. It’s not hard. You can literally just do that. And-

Andrea:
And there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I think that’s a great place. I think that’s a perfect place to start. That’s where I started was white. And then very, very quickly, you’re like, okay, I’m bored now. Yeah.

Meagan:
What else can I do?

Andrea:
I need some variety. Yeah. And then you’re comfortable with challenging yourself. Like, you’re like, okay, I’ma just mix my spell and iron corn and see what happens here. You know? And it’s okay.

Meagan:
Right. Yeah. And I think it’s the hard thing is if you see the person who knows how to make a beautiful loaf, a beautiful white loaf as the expert, you might get stuck there because you’ll never figure out how you can get trapped.

Andrea:
Yeah. And it’s great to progress.

Meagan:
I’m not being paid to say this, by the way. Allison and I did not make a side deal, but she recommended Pretty in one of the episodes I listened to before I got started, had been talking about the mock meal. And I was like, I don’t know, that seems like a kind of a big investment considering I’ve literally never made sourdough in my life. However, I invested in it pretty quickly, like maybe after my third loaf or something. And it kind of was a game changer for me because there’s just something about, first of all, the simplification of being able to have the berries in my, and not have to worry so much about, is this flower still good? Do I have to use it up in a certain, you know, time frame, whatever.

Andrea:
Does it smell rancid? Did I buy too much?

Meagan:
Exactly. And then just the engaging, the engagement with the product, it’s different. It feels like when I grind grain, it feels like I’m doing a thing. I don’t really know how else to put it.

Andrea:
Oh, I am so with you. A hundred percent. Yeah. It’s so, I don’t know. It’s, it’s hard to explain the satisfying feeling, but it’s there, the reward. And the, it’s really hard to explain to, you know, if you’ve, if you’ve eaten, you know, Wonder Bread and then you made your own bread at home and you’re like, oh my gosh, This is so much better. Well, imagine that you’re used to that homemade bread and then you make fresh milled bread and you’re like, I can’t believe I thought that was good. Like this is incredible. So there’s just all kinds of deliciousness waiting on the other side of that mock meal. I’ll put the link to the mock mill in the show notes because we actually have a referral to that, but you have to go through our website link. So, like, you know how that goes, Megan. Like, if you send the link to your husband and then he buys it, then it doesn’t work anymore. Right.

Meagan:
Yep.

Andrea:
So you have to go through the website. Okay. As we get—okay, I’m actually going to pour myself a cup of tea.

Meagan:
Oh, okay.

Andrea:
And then— Mine’s half gone. I want— um so you opened a tea and creative supply shop yes and i’m yes sad because it’s in michigan

Meagan:
There’s two locations i will tell you about tell me the story okay i have been a digital, worker for a very long time decades now uh where i’ve done the majority of my work has been done at home on a computer which was really great when my kids were little you know that it was It allowed for me to be home a lot and that’s wonderful, but I have had this itch to do a brick and mortar, something out there in the world, something maybe a little more physical. And, um, my family owns a little market and that’s a whole long side story, but basically my sister and her husband and my husband and I bought a building together about seven hours North of here in the upper peninsula of Michigan. And we started like a little public market in there. And the building is so huge. So like my husband is working on renovating the building, getting it back to its original historical beauty, blah, blah, blah. My sister and her husband are up there working. And we needed to fill this building with stuff because it’s huge. And we just didn’t have enough vendors coming in. So we each started our own little store. And I thought, well, what do I love? I love tea. And I like to do. Yes. And I like crafting. and I like journaling and things like that. So my concept is Bevy and the idea is that Bevy is a flock of birds and it’s also short.

Andrea:
Oh my gosh. I know. I didn’t even make that connection.

Meagan:
You know, so many people have said to me.

Andrea:
I just got chills.

Meagan:
So many people have said, is your name Beverly? I’m like, no, no, it’s not. What? No. No, but anyway.

Andrea:
But that’s, oh, that’s so cool. So it’s like a beverage.

Meagan:
I love a punch. It’s birds. It’s togetherness, all that stuff. So it actually went really well up there, but I’m not there to run it. So it makes it a little less fun. You know, one of the nice things about a retail store is that you get to engage with the people who come in. And I was sort of had an eye on my local area of Michigan where I live full time, and that’s Southwest Michigan. And then saw that, but I didn’t really want to buy a building. I didn’t want that level of, I guess, investment or expense. And then it turned out that a yoga studio where I’ve been going for years, where I actually did teacher training a few years ago, was looking for someone to move into their retail space. And I knew exactly what the space was. It’s like the perfect size. And it all happened. It all escalated very quickly, as they say. Um, and I started the second location of Bevy inside the studio, um, back in March. So yeah, it’s, it’s all. So now I have two tea shops, one that where I can actually be there to pour tea and, um, engage with the customers. And it’s been great, but I, I’ve always loved tea. I’ve loved tea since I was a little kid. I would say in the last few years, I’ve gotten into tea, which is a very different thing. It’s different. Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, I’m glad you did because I’m going to benefit from it. Let’s, I want to hear… I’m so excited because you are a hyperfocuser too. And so I get to plumb the depths of your hyperfocus. And that’s just the things you mentioned to Allison and myself on Voxer, this and that about tea. I messaged Allison. I was like, please let me. I got to get this. But she was messaging me at the same time. You have to talk to her about this. So I’m super excited that you’re going to be able to share all this with our listeners because I know we have a lot of listeners who drink tea to the exclusion of coffee. And we have a lot of listeners like myself who drink both. I alternate. And just the things you said were such good insights. I’m going to—I guess I don’t actually have the ability to check timestamps on here, but that’s okay. I’m going to pause us for a quick ad break, and then we’ll come right back in and go straight into the tea situation. Okay. So as we go down the tea road, first of all, my kids just ran down the stairs and told me that there’s three baby sheep upstairs.

Meagan:
So I guess our sheep land. Like they just broke in? Oh, my gosh.

Andrea:
No, like just now. Just born this morning. So that just happened. So you’ve got the abundance of eggs. We’ve got the baby sheep. Now we’re going to talk about tea. it’s springtime and to put the icing on this cake i also have something for our podcast supporters as a extra thank you for keeping us on the air allison actually created a recipe just for you and me for this episode

Meagan:
I’m so excited about this.

Andrea:
So she made a spelt scone vanilla scone well spelt okay so the actual name is buttermilk and spelt lemon and vanilla scone now i can’t remember the name something like that all those words are in the name and that’s all the words that i love so this is branded delicious scone with delicious tea so we have this amazing spelt recipe from allison i will pop it in the download section where patrons can go download everything and if you aren’t yet a supporter of the podcast then you can go to the link in the show notes and join. And that download will be waiting for you as well as a zillion other awesome things. So that is there for you to make. And now I want you to do your thing, Megan, and riff on tea for us.

Meagan:
Well, before I get started, I do think it’s important to note that tea is a lifelong, I guess, exploration, learning. I could sit here and do nothing but read about tea for the rest of my life, and I still wouldn’t know everything. So there’s definitely going to be holes in my knowledge. I am not a tea sommelier, although I found out you can actually become a tea sommelier. So I am beginning.

Andrea:
I’m sorry, what?

Meagan:
Yes, there is a tea sommelier certification that I am in the early, early stages of. So most of my knowledge kind of comes from a very Western.

Andrea:
Wait, are you doing it?

Meagan:
I am doing it. Yeah.

Andrea:
Oh my gosh.

Meagan:
But it’s going to take a long time for me to get through it. So, but yeah, my, so my knowledge is mostly pretty firmly entrenched in the Western tradition. I don’t know a ton about, you know, like Japanese Zen tea culture. And China, of course, has its own very rich and storied tea culture. So I know what I know. And there’s a lot that I don’t know. But I guess I would just jump in and say, I think a really cool place to start is to just kind of examine what we think we know about tea through that Western history. Because I think we get the idea. We think of Brits, right, with their little dainty teacups and their cucumber sandwiches and this three-tiered tray and all of that with the little cakes on it. And that is like a really legitimate part of tea history, but it’s pretty recent for one thing. It really didn’t get started until the 17th and 18th centuries in the Western world at all. And British tea culture is just one. So if you go way, way, way back to like the 20, uh, I don’t know, like the 27th century BC, something like that was when the legend goes that, uh, um.

Meagan:
That a Chinese emperor was boiling water and a tea leaf fell in it. And that, I mean, is this real or not? I don’t know. It’s, that’s the legend that a tea leaf floated down off of a tree, fell into some boiling water. Voila, here’s tea. And it was really considered medicine for a very long time and didn’t really start moving into other cultures until much, much later. I think it was about the 6th century AD that it found its way into Japan but didn’t really take off there to like the 1100s and then started making its way into the Western Hemisphere in the 16th and 17th century. So that’s like a long time. And every culture has put its own stamp on tea. So if you look at what like a Moroccan tea practice or culture looks like, it’s really different from Russia or Iran. Poland. You know, all these places have their own strong tea cultures, but they’re all a little bit different. They use different tea wear. They use different vessels to make the tea and drink the tea. Have you seen those Russian tea samovars?

Andrea:
Oh my goodness. We bought our house from a Russian family and there’s actually a place in the kitchen built for it. They had one there when we came here and I was telling my husband, I want to get one so I

Meagan:
Can put it there. Oh, I want one so bad. I know. they’re really really cool wow yeah they all so what i think is really neat is if you look back through history it’s like the way each culture has taken and put a spin on tea it’s sort of like the tea becomes the outlet for the underlying culture sort of and i feel like you could go down all these roads with and just learn so much about a culture just based on how they do tea um Oh.

Andrea:
What an interesting anthropological perspective. Yeah, the British so proper, everything in its place, stiff upper lip, noblesse oblige.

Meagan:
And with the Chinese tea culture, highly ritualized, highly decorative, beautiful, rehearsed, you know, very theatrical. Wow. And then contrast that with the Zen, the Japanese Zen, which I just know a little bit about, but very much more in line with that culture. Now, interestingly, China and Japan produce lots of tea, but don’t actually per capita drink a lot of tea. And I actually wonder if it’s because the rituals around it are so, I don’t know, they’re so like infused ha ha ha with meaning. That pun was not intended, but I’m going to go with it.

Andrea:
You just can’t help yourself.

Meagan:
Anyway, I wonder if that makes it like, it was so, yes, the history is so steeped in, in this ritual that I wonder if it’s just not casually, that’s just an assumption. I really don’t know that it’s just not like, let’s go through a drive-thru and pick up a paper cup of tea. Right. Because that’s not what they’re doing it for. So yeah, that’s a place to start. Um.

Andrea:
It’s almost like you could stand at like the T crossroads and just choose, you know, which one do you want to go down? And then you could spend the rest of your life there.

Meagan:
Just going down one.

Andrea:
Just looking at that one. I know.

Meagan:
So I’m sort of still kind of like, I’m at the part before the road forks. I’m like still on the path leading up to that and like peeking down the different roads and being like, which one? Which one interests me most and which one do I want to go down? Um, I guess because I am a, I am a Westerner and I have a Western sensibility. Um, I am always really interested in that, that sort of evolution of what tea has looked like. And I do know that the way it became part of English culture was that a Portuguese princess married Catherine of Braganza in the 17th century, married King Charles II, and she basically brought tea with her. Like she already loved tea. Tea was already kind of a thing in Portugal and because of the trade routes and how that had happened. And she ended up bringing it into making it more of a thing among the upper classes.

Andrea:
It literally seems like—I’m sorry. Oh, go ahead. Well, for English people, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like so much fundamentally that we know about England happened or was changed. It all started in the 1600s, a lot of these things, you know? Yeah. Like potatoes and tea and tobacco and coffee and I guess now the tea rituals. Yeah.

Meagan:
Isn’t it crazy that when you think about England, but a tiny little country, it really is.

Andrea:
Pilgrims.

Meagan:
And then how much, like it became such a hotspot for all of these different things.

Andrea:
Like a central pivot point. Yeah.

Meagan:
Yeah. In the mid 1800s, a guy named Robert Fortune actually went to China, dressed up like a Chinese man. What? And like infiltrated farms. And I believe stole or pirated, they were very protective of their, of their plants. And, you know, for good reason, right?

Andrea:
It’s like their cultural inheritance, right?

Meagan:
And he basically stole, stole trade secrets and stole plants and smuggled them back to England where they wound up in India and became, like, that’s kind of how England got in on that trade. What?

Andrea:
That’s how they got, oh my gosh, I didn’t know that. Yes. Classic. Classic.

Meagan:
Classic colonizers i know i know so yes so that’s that’s just a few like little snapshots and any one of these stories you could read for days about um another thing that’s really interesting about all that is what we tend to think of as high tea so in our minds that’s often the little finger sandwiches and the dainty china that actually was don’t.

Andrea:
Break the image megan well

Meagan:
I’m not gonna break the image because that did exist among the upper classes that that that tea ritual definitely is a thing and still is a thing. But that was more like an afternoon tea that you would have if you were, say, a Downton Abbey type, right?

Andrea:
Obviously, that’s what we all would have been. Of course. We would have been Earls or whatever.

Meagan:
But if you were a working family, if you were of the working classes, your afternoon, your high tea actually was taken at high tables. And it was more like a meal. That was like when you came home from work.

Andrea:
Wait, like a physically high table?

Meagan:
Yes, a physically high table. Like a table you would stand at.

Andrea:
Is that why it’s high tea?

Meagan:
Yes. But it’s gotten kind of mingled in the translation. So a lot of tea houses will have what they call high tea, which for them is like high, low, meaning high class and fancy. But actually high tea would have been a midday meal. You would have had a sandwich. You know, you would have come home and had your cup of tea and a sandwich.

Andrea:
Was it like those tables at parties where they’re like, you can sort of stand there and put your champagne glass on it? Yeah, I think so.

Meagan:
I think it was literally a high…

Andrea:
Like you’re not sitting down to eat. you’re standing and sort of yes getting a little

Meagan:
Because it’s like a working person’s meal essentially you know you would um yeah so i mean i think often these phrases become, they become part of the um the nomenclature is that what i’m like the word i’m looking for and we we adapt them to what we want them to be and so i’m not going to go after somebody if they call it high tea because that’s what people know it as but those aren’t the origin of that phrase is not fancy. It is working class. Oh, I love it. So, yeah. So there you go. That’s a snapshot of kind of what’s all going on.

Andrea:
That’s so interesting. Okay, so they’ve got their high tea. What’s the difference? And I know a little bit about this from the kombucha side, actually, is where I did most of my reading about tea. But I would like you to explain. Talk to me like I’m five. What is the difference between the black, green, oolong, white tea, and what I have right now is something called a pu-erh?

Meagan:
Oh, a pu-erh, yeah. That is like an extra fermented black tea.

Andrea:
And it comes in like a little cake.

Meagan:
Oh, I’m jealous.

Andrea:
And she wrote on the bag, steep again. And I was like, that’s what Megan said.

Meagan:
I love it. But, okay, so I didn’t even really know what a Puerh tea was until, I don’t know, not that long ago because it wasn’t even, you know, if you’re going to go to, like, Starbucks and order a cup of tea off the menu, they’re not going to have a Puerh tea in there. Really? Yeah, because it’s not, well, first of all, I’ve never seen a Puerh in a bag. Maybe, maybe it exists.

Andrea:
I’ve never.

Meagan:
Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, I’ve never even heard of that. I think that’s a little more specialized. But what’s really interesting about all of the teas that you named and there’s another one that is a little more obscure called yellow tea which is what i know right um me they all come from the same plant so they’re all from the camellia sinensis plant there are a couple different varieties within that plant but if something is a true tea it all comes from the same plant and the what makes it a black tea versus a green tea versus an oolong or a white or a yellow is the amount of processing and the way it’s processed. Black teas are processed the most. And then poo-wurrs actually go through like another fermentation process after they become black teas and they like have a secondary fermentation, which gives them that almost like mushroomy flavor sometimes. They’re very earthy and can be really rich and interesting.

Meagan:
But a white tea is really hardly processed at all. A green tea might be steamed. And then an oolong is sort of like between green and black. Yellow, I believe, is more like between white and oolong. So there’s sort of these levels of how much they’ve been toyed with once after they’ve been picked off the plant. And that’s a whole other thing, too. I mean, if you ever look in a can of loose leaf tea, they all look a little different. Some look like long rolled up leaves. Some look like little flakes. Some look almost like little, like little, almost like oat groats. Like that’s the texture. Yes. Yeah. And it’s all about that processing. And, The Western world really adopted black tea, not going to say by accident, but mostly because that could withstand more travel. It could withstand long journeys. But the Chinese didn’t love black tea.

Andrea:
That is very interesting.

Meagan:
I think they thought they were kind of passing junk off on us because they were really curious about less processed tea.

Andrea:
Oh, that’s so fascinating. I knew that the black, green, and white were from the same, and I didn’t really know about oolong or pu-erh where they came from. So that’s very interesting. I really want one of those trees. I’ve looked for several years, and usually I find somebody that has them, and they say, oh, we just sold the last one. So then I have to start over again the next year.

Meagan:
I bought one online last year. Maybe one day I’ll get one. I can’t remember now where I bought it from, but I’ll try to find out and send you the link so you can put it in the…

Andrea:
And I had never seen one until we lived in Virginia. And I was in their botanical gardens. And they had them in the botanical gardens. And I was like, wait, what? And I knew because I was probably there teaching a kombucha class or something. Anyways, but I knew from my kombucha reading that, you know, the Camellia sinensis was the tree. And so when I saw the name on the, I was like, wait, I’m looking at a tea tree?

Meagan:
Right, right, right. Yeah, and they don’t do well, obviously, in our climate. We’re not the right climate for them. I had mine sat out on the patio all summer. It looked beautiful. I brought it in in the fall, it flowered, and that was beautiful. You know, it had all those, not magnolia, chamelea, blooms. Beautiful, beautiful. Then all of it dropped off and now it looks basically dead. I’m really hoping that it’s just dormant and it will revive when the weather perks up. And we’re recording this in March. So hopefully, you know, by May it’ll start to look good again.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah. Post in the Discord if it does.

Meagan:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Do the flowers have a use or no?

Meagan:
So I collected the flowers because they were so pretty and I did brew up a couple of cups of tea with them and I thought they didn’t have.

Andrea:
A lot of

Meagan:
Flavor. They looked really beautiful though. I think, and also I will, I will also say that I tried to make tea from the tea leaves on this plant multiple times last year and I thought it was pretty lackluster. Mostly because I don’t know what I’m doing. I tried to, I tried to do like the whole oxidation process to get a cup of black tea out of it. And I, at some point I wasn’t doing it right. I mean, it’s a whole thing.

Andrea:
You, you wither the leaves. I mean, people dedicate their lives to this, right?

Meagan:
So you have to pick the leaves at the right time. Then you’ve got to wither the leaves at the right amount of time. Then you have to roll the leaves, which can be quite intensely, you know, takes a while. Then you dry them in the oven. It’s a whole thing. And I did it a few times.

Andrea:
That doesn’t just happen when they dry? No. The rolling? No.

Meagan:
The funny thing is we were gone for like a week. And when we came home, all the leaves had dropped off on our bedroom floor. Cause that’s where it is overwintering right now. And I threw the leaves out. My husband’s like, what are you throwing out those tea leaves? And I said, they’re not tea. They’re just leaves. I would have had to do something. And that ship sailed. Like, now they’re crunchy. What you want is the soft baby leaf as it’s growing off the plant.

Andrea:
And they’re no good just fresh off the tree. They’re not.

Meagan:
I think if I had taken the fresh leaves off the tree and steamed them or done, like, a really gentle process, I probably actually could have had a green or a white. I was trying to skip right to the hardest one. I don’t know why.

Andrea:
Obviously.

Meagan:
Because why wouldn’t I?

Andrea:
I’ve met you online, and I’m not surprised.

Meagan:
I was like, I’m going to make a cup of English breakfast, and I don’t even know what I’m doing. So anyway, I’ll try again this year.

Andrea:
And you’re like, I think I’ll have a chicken. I’ll take 24.

Meagan:
Exactly. Well, it happens. It happens. It’s true. So yeah, that’s kind of the differences between that class.

Andrea:
Okay, so outside of those teas, and those have varying levels of caffeine, which is affected by the processing. Yep. Then what about herbal tea? And is tea the right word to use? Is tea referring to a process?

Meagan:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Oh, they’re cute. Camille just brought me pictures of the little babies.

Meagan:
Are they as cute as they?

Andrea:
They’re adorable. It has black legs, great fluffy fur. I’ll send you pictures, Megan, when I get outside. Oh, my gosh.

Meagan:
Well, so here’s the thing about herbal tea. If you ask a tea snob or someone who is in the industry and feels very strongly about the, I don’t know, like the purity of the process, then no. They would be considered an infusion or a tessane or something like, you know, you wouldn’t call it a tea.

Andrea:
That’s somebody who wants their industry terms clear and definable. And I think that’s fine. That’s fine.

Meagan:
Here’s kind of where I fall. Again, language changes over time. I was really curious, when did people start using the word tea to mean anything that has soaked in water?

Andrea:
And I actually found— Well, we can also ask that question about milk. Like, since when is an almond blended with water milk? Right. But I digress.

Meagan:
Well, the first recorded mention of beef tea goes back to 1760. So that’s 300 plus years ago does that mean it’s is that legitimate within a hundred.

Andrea:
Years of them of drinking

Meagan:
Right so obviously it pretty quickly became used interchangeably as something that meant right soak this thing and this thing is an extract essentially in hot water that happened really fast so this.

Andrea:
Is where i want that second life as a philologist so the I’m thinking about the, like, coffee and how when Allison and I were looking at coffee in Karima’s book, Chewing the Fat, about the Italians in, like, the 1910s, 1920s, and they were brewing all kinds of things during World War II. Yeah. And they were calling it coffee because that’s what you wanted. But it wasn’t really coffee. But that’s what the practice was, as it were.

Meagan:
So it reminds me of something like, okay, here’s an example. I think like when a hamburger was first invented, everybody knew a hamburger was ground beef. And now I assume probably was chipped. Actually, it was probably like chipped beef at one point. But anyway, now if someone made you a ground turkey patty and put it on a bun and handed it to you and you said thanks for the burger and they said, that’s not a burger. I mean, it would be kind of obnoxious, right? So I try to like, I try to walk that line.

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s that pedant that you’re like, I don’t know about you right now.

Meagan:
Like, I understand that there’s like a whole culture around it and that there are people are protective of that. And I understand that for sure. And then I’m also like, but if 90% of the people don’t know the difference is I’m not.

Andrea:
You’re not you’re not communicating.

Meagan:
And I’m not going to be the one to be like, sorry, soaking chamomile and, you know, steeping chamomile in water isn’t tea. So I try to just have.

Andrea:
I do love a pedantic fact, though.

Meagan:
Well, they’re always nice to have in your back pocket, aren’t they?

Andrea:
And then when somebody calls you out and is like, that’s not a tea. You can say, actually, no. Yeah. And it’s fine. Yes. I’m going with the vernacular.

Meagan:
Exactly. Exactly.

Andrea:
So herbal tea could just be a infusion.

Meagan:
I mean, if someone comes into my shop and says, do you have an herbal tea? I sell them an herbal tea.

Andrea:
You’re not going to be like, get out.

Meagan:
I don’t correct them. I just say, and sometimes I’ll say, hey, did you know that, were you aware that actually all these other teas all come from the same plant? And that’s why they’re considered true teas. I think it’s interesting information and people love that little bit of education. And I also at the same time try not to be ridiculous.

Andrea:
Well, it’s also helpful, actually, because this is where the confusion and then trying to unravel the language and get back to correct terms actually can cause more confusion. I’ve seen this in ancestral things a lot, because now somebody will post a blog, here’s an herbal infusion, and then everybody goes, how is that different than herbal tea? Please explain. And you’re like, well, okay. Now we’re working on, you know, just defining terms. And somebody is stuck and says, well, I would like to make an infusion of yarrow, but I don’t know how, you know.

Meagan:
Well, and at what point does a word like tea become bigger than the thing it was originally supposed to be? That’s the other question. Like at what point do we not get to be too precious about it anymore? And who gets to claim what a word means?

Andrea:
Yeah. Have you ever said, hand me a Kleenex and somebody goes, I’m sorry, this is not a Kleenex brand. Do you still want it? Right. Like, I don’t care. Right.

Meagan:
I just want something to wipe my mouth.

Andrea:
I use the word generically.

Meagan:
Exactly.

Andrea:
Right. Let’s take a quick ad break and then I’ll have another sip of my tea and we’ll jump back in with some discussion on what is a local tea. Thank you. Okay, is there such a thing as a local tea?

Meagan:
I mean, I really hate to tell you this, but if you live in Washington State or Michigan, there’s really not. I will say there is a tea farm in northern Michigan. I went and visited it and had a lovely conversation. It’s all biodynamic. It’s really cool. But I said to the owner.

Meagan:
I didn’t know you could grow tea in Michigan. And she said, well, you can’t unless you spend a lot of money. So, you know, the way she has been able to do it is with hoop houses and very intensive practices that don’t really work with the natural climate that we’re in. Right. Which does raise some questions if we’re like living an ancestral lifestyle or aiming for that. You know? Right. I think that for me, it becomes one of those things that I’m okay with importing, especially considering how lightweight it is. So, for example, if I was going to import a pound of tea leaves or have them imported for me, let’s just say, then I’m going to probably get, I don’t know, something like 400 cups of tea or something like that out of that pound of tea leaves. I’d rather do that than wine. You know, just like if you’re thinking ounce for ounce or anything where you import it and it’s water-based, that’s a lot more difficult. That’s a lot of water to move. A lot of water delivery. It’s heavy. It requires a lot more fuel. So I’m okay with that.

Andrea:
And it has to be more carefully, you know, you can’t jostle.

Meagan:
Exactly.

Andrea:
Or slam it.

Meagan:
So I think that that’s one way of looking at it. We all have our things that we do that aren’t 100% produced in our backyards, and that has been the case for hundreds, thousands of years in some cases, depending on what it is. I feel like that’s one of those little trade-offs that… Humans have would have been making ancestrally even if they were different trade-offs if that makes sense like imports have been around for a long long time maybe the things that were being imported or had the distances were different so that’s kind of i’m like i know i don’t need to justify it but that’s one way and another way really is to lean in on herbals if you really are more comfortable sourcing things super locally um there’s a lot that can be done with the herbs that grow in your area and they can be used to blend like blended with true tea they can be used to replace it um like my area will there’s a lot of herbs that will grow in my area and do grow in my area and if you wanted to really locally source all of your eatables and drinkables it could be done it might just mean you aren’t really getting uh camellia sinensis or maybe you’re growing it in a plant on your deck, and you’re doing a better job than me. Also possible, right?

Andrea:
Right. And can I ask you a question that I should have asked you in the last section, which is Allison’s favorite tea, Ruebos. And that is not a tea leaf, but that’s an Australian bush, is it not? And there is no caffeine in it?

Meagan:
But is it an herb? and i believe it’s african but maybe they also might also grow it in australia i know um it’s it’s bush tea it’s referred to as bush tea there’s two kinds of bush tea red bush tea and i think honey bush tea is the other one uh rooibos is is red bush tea and if you’ve ever read the or heard of the um, Number one ladies detective agency books. Do you know what I’m talking about? They were huge in the 2000s, but I think there’s like 25 of them now. It’s actually a Scottish guy wrote them. They’re very low stakes mystery books, kind of. I wouldn’t even say mystery. It’s like they have a detective agency.

Andrea:
Like cozy puzzle.

Meagan:
They’re cozies. Yes. But there is excessive amounts of tea drinking in these books. Like a lot of tea drinking and it’s all, and it takes place in Botswana. And so the, it’s all bush tea. I really like bush tea or rooibos or whatever you want to call it as a sort of non-caffeinated alternate alternative to black tea because it’s more, not all herbal teas have a ton of flavor and this would be considered more of an herbal tea because it’s not camellia sinensis. It’s, um, It’s just heartier. I don’t really know how else to describe it. It’s the flavor of it. You could put milk and sugar in it if you wanted to, and it would hold up to that, where most herbals would not.

Andrea:
Yeah, I do like Roe Boss. It isn’t my top. I think I prefer the Pu’erh or the Oolong or something like that. But I do like Roe Boss, and we usually have it in the house.

Meagan:
Yeah, it’s good. I, for a while, didn’t think I liked it. I think maybe the flavor was not what I was expecting the first couple times I drank it. I almost felt like it made me a little nauseous. But I have found a few lately that are blended with, like one has lemongrass and another one.

Andrea:
Oh, that sounds good.

Meagan:
One has something, maybe… Oh man, maybe Hibiscus. I can’t remember now what the other one is, but really like it. They just, they put a totally different spin on it. Um, and that would be something, you know, sometimes at the, the second half of the day, I want something really hearty to drink and caffeine is not always the best choice for me at that time of day, because then I’ll just lay away blinking at the ceiling all evening. So, um, thinking of new podcasts, you should start exactly the last thing I need to be doing. So I do find that a bush tea is nice. It’s got the body I want without any caffeine.

Andrea:
Okay. Well, then let’s go to sourcing tea. What are the things that you’re looking at? Obviously, if I lived by you, I would just go, well, no, if I lived seven hours away from you, I would be going to your sister’s store or going to the one in the yoga studio. But yeah, what do you look for? I know there’s the fair trade denotation, which has become popular in the last 20 years. And then there’s organic versus not organic. And you know all of our standard concerns. So please speak to us.

Meagan:
Well, here’s the thing. I’m early enough in this as I’m now seeing things through the eyes of a retailer, whereas before I only saw things through the eyes of a consumer. And it does change things a little bit when you get closer to the sourcing, you know, and to what those, yeah, to like kind of what that chain looks like. I think what I’m starting to realize now is that like with anything, fair trade can be great or it can mean almost nothing. Organic can be great or it can be not so great. It’s really the relationship you have with the supplier that matters. Do you trust that supplier or not? Because most people doing things like this on my level, with my level of knowledge and my level of contacts, which are very new and just growing, like slowly growing, I really.

Meagan:
Rely on some middleman or some third party to tell me what I need to know. I’m not traveling to China right now and going to farms myself and like developing relationships with farmers. I’m not doing it on that largest scale that I can do that. It sounds lovely. I would love to do that, but I’m not doing that. So I need an interpreter almost that can kind of help me make sense of what’s out there and can assure me that the conditions on a farm are healthy and good. And sometimes with those designations, a lot of that is marketing. And I read a book called Infused and the author’s name is Henrietta Lovell. I think this book is so fun. She has a company called the Rare Tea Company. And so it’s mostly a memoir. It’s like her going all over the world and going to tea farms and talking about tea. What a life. It’s pretty great. But she kind of makes a comment somewhere in the book, toward the end, I feel like, and it was about fair trade and how.

Meagan:
There’s a logo on a package. What does that mean? You know, does that mean that the farm itself is benefiting from that? Or is it the organization that’s benefiting from it? Is it just something to make us feel better about what we’re buying? That’s, yeah, that’s the thing where I think it gets a little tricky. So what I’m trying to do right now is keep the number of brands I work with relatively low and learn more about those brands. And then I just have to at some point trust that the relationships they’re developing directly with the buyers and you know there’s a lot about working with smaller farms cooperatives things like that that they’re kind of doing that legwork for me but I don’t know enough to be.

Meagan:
To be super confident at all times and if I don’t and this is what I’m doing then I guarantee you the person who owns your like supermarket does not like the stuff that’s in yeah that’s it yeah in the supermarket aisle is 100 even if it says fair trade they’re putting their money into marketing not necessarily actually like the sourcing so that’s i’m i’m ignorant enough that that’s the best i can tell you right now but still learning and same with organic you know what did organic mean 20 or 30 years ago versus what it means now i right if i buy from a local, I ask them how they raise the animals or the crops, but I don’t necessarily ask if they’re certified organic because I know that that is cost prohibitive for a lot of farms and it doesn’t always tell you what you need to know. So, yeah, it’s like that only.

Andrea:
Yeah, it’s frustrating because so much can be obfuscated behind the labels. Yes. And. Yeah.

Meagan:
And what the labels mean has changed.

Andrea:
Yes. Yes. And that’s the other frustrating thing. And then some independent group researches and says something else and you’re like, I don’t know what to buy. Okay. Well, that’s great.

Meagan:
For those of us who don’t. We’ll put a pin in that conversation. We’ll come back to it in two years when I know more. But that’s kind of where I’m starting.

Andrea:
Oh, yes. Yeah. And for me, just the, you know, average person on the street. So I get our tea at, it’s a little, you know, one of those little weird shops with like incense and tea and spices and jars and stuff. And the lady’s so kind and, but I have no idea if the tea, you know, anything about where the tea comes from.

Meagan:
Yeah.

Andrea:
So.

Meagan:
And she may or may not, that’s the thing too. Like she might just be trusting her source or her distributor. There could be lots of levels with something like this of hands they’re passing through.

Andrea:
So with my kombucha tea I get Frontier brand organic tea in the one pound bags

Meagan:
But I.

Andrea:
Don’t I mean I sometimes steep that for myself to drink but I guess I don’t know if they sell an oolong now that I think about it I’ve never even looked

Meagan:
China Green but I yeah.

Andrea:
I’ve liked whatever I got from them

Meagan:
Okay and honestly and actually Frontier does I believe wholesale so some a lot of times it’s interesting to see things turn up and I’ll I’m starting to be able to kind of figure out when I see something like on a tea house menu and I’ll think well that looks a lot an awful lot like a one like one that I know Harney and Sons carries or one of those big brands because they’re it’s it’s a little it’s it’s a pretty small world you know, it’s pretty intimate. Yeah. Um, yeah. So at some point there’s definitely going to be crossover, you know?

Andrea:
Right. Um, this is, this is the question everybody has been waiting for me to ask. What about teabags? Take us there.

Meagan:
Well, here’s the, okay. I’ll give you a little history about teabags because I think it’s fascinating. Please. Yes.

Andrea:
You know that’s what I want.

Meagan:
I know. I’m just here for the history. So, or to deliver it to you, Andrea, I’m here for what you want. Yes. So teabags were sort of accidentally invented in the early 20th century. An American salesman, they’re always so innovative, aren’t they? He started sending out samples in these little silk bags. And people getting the samples didn’t realize that he intended for it to be poured out of the bag into the teapot. And they were just dunking the bags in their teapots in the hot water. And then they were like, wow, again, voila, this is great. They really took off in the 20s. What? Yeah. They took off in the 20s in the U.S. Yeah, I know. But really interestingly, they didn’t pick up steam in England and Great Britain. It wasn’t called Great Britain at the time, was it? I get confused about what the names have been.

Andrea:
I don’t know.

Meagan:
Anyway, England until after World War II.

Andrea:
The British Isles. Yes.

Meagan:
So now what I think is really interesting is that teabags now make up 96% of the British market. Whoa. And only 65% of tea consumed in Great Britain is from a bag. But only 65% in the United States, which I think is really interesting. Hold up. Yeah. Hold up. Okay. the.

Andrea:
Kids are doing better than the parents

Meagan:
However that could also be skewed by the fact that something like 85 percent or more of the tea consumed in the u.s is actually iced tea and when you start going down that rabbit hole or down that lane then you’re realizing okay like how much of this is like this is.

Andrea:
Gonna look bad for

Meagan:
Us right i know this is embarrassing now we They don’t want to talk about it anymore. 65% versus 96%. So here, here, let’s break this down. Yes. Microplastics in tea bags. It is a thing. Leached tea bags. It is a thing. The thing that they, they aren’t very eco-friendly. They take a long time to break down. Sometimes they never break down.

Andrea:
Wait, what are they made out of?

Meagan:
Plastic? Sometimes they have plastic. Yeah. Sometimes they’re legitimately made of plastic or there’s plastic like in the thing that holds the, like the adhesive that holds the string to the bag itself. Sometimes that’s where the plastics are.

Andrea:
Yeah, you’re steeping glue in your bag. I never thought about that.

Meagan:
But there are alternatives. Most of the companies that I personally stock, they use… Like a food grade starch for their tea bags. They’re very, they’re very silky. They’re very delicate. Actually, they tear really easily, but that is an option. You can use those. Here’s my thing. My issue with tea bags, I’m not even going to go into the safety because we all know that now that’s been all over the news and, you know, just you decide what you’re going to do while you’re out and about. If you want to go, if you’re like on a trip someplace and you go to the gas station and all they have is tea bags. You know, I’m not going to yell at you because you drink a cup of that tea. But the value is really not there because if you got a can of tea for 15 bucks from my store, let’s just say you’re buying from this brand that I love that a lot of people love. If you buy the same size $15 tin and it’s loose leaf, you’re getting at least twice as much tea. Than the teabag and they’re the same cost.

Meagan:
So there’s that it’s way more economical. You can almost always infuse a cup or a, you know, a serving of leaves. You can almost always infuse it twice and sometimes three or four times harder to do with the bag because it, it’s not as much tea for one thing. And also what you and I talked about when we were kind of brainstorming this episode is that the, the water doesn’t.

Meagan:
It doesn’t really flow through a teabag the same way as it does through a nice mug style infuser or the infuser, you know, different kinds of infusers that I like to use. So, like, you’re not getting the movement of the water that you want. And then one other little thing to throw in here, and this is getting kind of in the weeds, but there’s a grating system with tea and at the very bottom of the grating system, and it’s theoretically, it’s not quality, it’s size of the leaf.

Meagan:
There’s like whole leaf and then there’s like the broken pieces, there’s fannings, which is kind of what’s left over after the tea has been processed. And then at the very bottom is dust. It’s literally dust. And that is what the majority of teabags that you see especially the budget teabags they’re dust it’s tea dust what happens with tea dust is when you pour the water in it infuses so fast, have you ever gone someplace and they put it you know they gave you a cup with a teabag in it and by the time you could even like get the lid off to get the teabag out it was bitter really bitter that’s because it infuses too fast. It gets too strong, too bitter, too quickly. And then it’s just dead. There’s nothing left. Like you’re not going to get a second infusion out of that teabag because it, it gave up, it gave up everything it had on its first. Everything went, everything went. So that, those are all the problems I have with teabags. The safety factor, it’s a thing you can get around it, but I think, you know, dollar for dollar, you’re just better off spending the money on good loose leaf and um and figure out the straining part it’s really not that hard i know we’re going to talk about that next but it really is not difficult to brew loose leaf okay.

Andrea:
But i think good loose leaf no no the good loose leaf and the brewing i think part of this problem solves itself by getting the good loose leaf tea because i have okay hold on the dog has camille’s Sorry. So the teapot I have next to me right now, I’m just looking inside, it has like these sort of holes. It’s an old teapot, but it kind of has these holes like where the spout is, right? So it can sift out leaves. If I were to cut open teabags and pour them in, all those leaves would just go right through the holes. Yeah.

Meagan:
Yes. They would also infuse so quickly. I just think you would have kind of a gross tea, honestly.

Andrea:
It would be disgusting. There would be no point.

Meagan:
Yeah.

Andrea:
But the tea that’s in it, like, okay, my teacup, I’ve drank the whole pot of tea while we’re sitting here. And my teacup has some in the bottom, like less than half a teaspoon. But all the leaves remain in the pot for the most part, and they’re big. Yeah they’re like so so in this case the straining is solved by the quality of the tea itself

Meagan:
It’s it definitely helps and there are some there are some high quality teas that do have a smaller just because of the way they’re on purpose like they’re smaller they’re not and they’re but they won’t.

Andrea:
All be the absolute

Meagan:
Dust and they’re not they’re not tea sludge Yes.

Andrea:
You don’t want such. I mean, even my herbal teas don’t really come through. Like I’ve got yarrow in here and blue lotus. And I’m looking. I don’t remember what else I put in here. Red raspberry is probably the smallest one. But, hmm.

Meagan:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Interesting. Okay. Well, so there’s a hot tip on saving some money. Let’s take another ad break. And then I want to ask you about your actual pepper. preparation methods. And then maybe I do have some more teabag questions, but could we, do you have time still to do a little bit of an after show?

Meagan:
Yeah, we could do.

Andrea:
And okay, great. Okay. Let’s take an ad break and then we’ll come right back. So how do you recommend preparing tea at home? And what do you have with it? Besides, of course, we shall all be making alicents, scones. Yes.

Meagan:
Okay, well, I’ll give you my whole rundown. I mean, the basic answer of how to make tea is pour hot water over leaves, right? So like just this is where we’re starting from.

Andrea:
What a great episode.

Meagan:
And done. So I have multiple different kinds of infusers. I have my very favorite one fits in a mug it’s pretty long so it goes not down to the very bottom of the mug but like you could make half a cup of tea and it would still the infuser would still reach down to.

Andrea:
Are you talking like a metal

Meagan:
Yep one of those little things that has okay that’s kind of my favorite I have a mug that has a lid that so you steep the tea take the lid off and then the lid actually holds the strainer. I also sometimes will make the tea in a teapot if I think I’m going to be, you know, sipping on it for a little while. Although I really then get sad if it gets cold. I don’t have a tea cozy, which I really need a tea cozy and I don’t have one.

Andrea:
I have been thinking the same thing. First of all, if you start carrying them in your store, I’ll, can I buy one over the internet? Yeah, of course. Secondly, I’ve been thinking, can I figure out how to just crochet one for my teapot?

Meagan:
I think it would, yes. I asked my sister to figure out how to crochet me one and I think they don’t seem very hard. Um, now you can, so like you were saying, you can just throw the leaves in a pot and pour the water over the pot and, and then just basically pour out of that. Sometimes there’s like a different kind of strainer that you can pour through if you need to, like those little ones with the handle, you know what I’m talking about, or the little ones that kind of rest at the top of the cup. Those are nice for catching leaves. Sometimes though, when you do it like that. If you’re not going to get to it for like 15 or 20 minutes and it’s a really strong tea, you may end up with a slightly too strong of a tea. So that’s one place where sometimes like it kind of depends on the tea itself, how quickly I think I’m going to drink it, whether it’s more convenient for me to strain it as I go. And then how hot the water is is also going to be dependent on the tea. So this is where I just think it’s, get a very basic knowledge of the properties of these drinks, of these teas. So you’re always going to use a slightly less hot water for like a white or a green than you would for a black tea. A black tea could really hold up to boiling water. A white or a green, probably not. It would probably make it very bitter.

Meagan:
But that’s not always the case. So sometimes you like try with a slightly less hot tea or water, brew it, maybe give it a little bit less time the first time, taste it, see what you think. The book that I recommended before, Infused, I really loved the way she talks about brewing times because I think before that I had really thought it was a very formulaic thing. Like this is how long you always let a black tea steep and it’s always at this temperature. And the way the writer really talks about these teas is not necessarily you know sometimes a certain tea is going to hold up a little bit differently to a certain temperature of water and sometimes like sometimes that advice does work so it’s kind of like that’s where the fun is um right is in starting to kind of play around and figuring out what you like and what works and what works for you. So that’s my advice there. I also always recommend to start without adding anything. Sip it. See what you think.

Meagan:
And then if you feel like it needs a little something, try it then. I would say the majority of oolongs, white teas, green teas, and herbals I drink, I don’t think need anything at all. If I’m drinking a black, like an English breakfast tea, which is kind of mint or an Irish breakfast tea especially, they’re blended to be strong and bracing and like highly caffeinated. So sometimes I do like a little splash of milk and a little bit of honey. And also in the morning, I really like something kind of creamy and sweet. If I was to have that same tea in the afternoon, I probably would drink it differently and not put any sweetener in it. So it’s very personal.

Meagan:
And I typically just drink my tea straight up. I don’t usually, unless I’m going to like a tea service someplace, I’m not sitting down every day with a three-tiered platter that has sandwiches and stuff.

Andrea:
What?

Meagan:
I know, right? Such a poser. But now that I have this scone recipe, maybe I will. I don’t know. How about you?

Andrea:
You know, I definitely will.

Meagan:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Okay, you might get a kick out of this since you’re the lady who loves tea. A friend of mine and I, when the last Downton Abbey movie came out, I mean, we wanted to go see it in theater. We both had like kids and babies and stuff like that, but we figured out a time when our husbands could watch them. And we could get away at the same time to go. and we said we’re bringing tea so when we showed up at the movie theater we had like these giant bags like clanking on our shoulders and then we sit down in the theater and we were so like it’s gonna be packed there’s gonna be so many people there’s two other people oh my gosh nobody cared and um we sat down in the like you know the ideal spot to watch and she pulls out the thermos she She made a chamomile tea infusion, I guess I should say. And then I pulled out, I had brought China teacups. And then we put those like on our cup holders. And

Meagan:
Then I pulled out.

Andrea:
The little creamer and a little container of sugar. And then, you know, we’re trying to do this quietly, but we can’t stop snickering because we didn’t really know what the other person had brought. Right. And then I gave her a tiny spoon and she like almost lost it. And then we knew we didn’t each have everything to make cucumber sandwiches, but we knew we wanted them. So, like, she brought sliced cucumbers and cream cheese and I brought bread. So, we’re, like, sitting there making cucumber sandwiches and, like, snickering. Then I handed her a scone. She got out jam and whipped cream. And then we just… We had our entire tea party and we’re like snickering and trying to keep it together the whole time. But every time somebody pulled out some tiny piece of china, we just lost it.

Meagan:
This makes me very happy.

Andrea:
Amazing.

Meagan:
I love this story.

Andrea:
It was the best movie theater experience ever.

Meagan:
I saw the Downton Abbey movie in the theater and I thought, you know, if you hadn’t watched the show, you would be very confused. Like for me, it was very satisfying.

Andrea:
It doesn’t make any sense.

Meagan:
It’s satisfying as a person who watched the whole series to like kind of revisit the old friends and all that. But I thought this is a feature film does not really, it doesn’t really hold up.

Andrea:
It doesn’t, no. It doesn’t matter. I mean, honestly, the later, the later movies, the storylines don’t even hold up.

Meagan:
No, none of them. But when you go back and rewatch it.

Andrea:
I’m literally here for the costumes.

Meagan:
Yeah. When you go back and rewatch it, you’re like, oh, right. I forgot like that happened to that guy. And it just, yeah. You know, come on, babes. Get it together. Okay, wait. This is not about Downton Abbey. but I was going to ask you about herbals and I was just going to make a comment that with herbals are the thing I will just let steep and steep and steep and steep because I like them to get really strong. The only one I think does not hold up well to that is chamomile. It can get a little bitter, but I will let, I’ll sometimes let an herbal steep for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Like I never let it stop steeping because I want as much flavor as I can get.

Andrea:
That’s true. That’s true. Okay. Okay. Okay, Allison’s scones, the buttermilk scones, the spelt scones, those will go in the downloads. I just want to make sure everybody knows for podcast supporters and that. I think they’re also in the Discord, actually. So if somebody’s in Discord, they can pop in there and get them too. Because Allison posted them in there originally to test.

Meagan:
Oh, yeah, she did. I saw them there.

Andrea:
But the printable PDF is so handy. Did you have anything else you wanted to give us on the main feed before we pop over to the after show? And then I wanted to ask you about the George Orwell essay and find out if you’d seen it. We can talk about that over there.

Meagan:
Oh, my gosh. Okay. No, I haven’t seen that, but we’ll talk about there. No, I think this was like we got into it. You know, like there’s a lot there. And I guess I would just recommend to people, if you feel like you want to get more into tea, go someplace where people are drinking tea. It is infectious.

Andrea:
What do you mean by go someplace? Like a tea house or like China?

Meagan:
It don’t let, well, yes, go to, go to China.

Andrea:
If you want to get into tea,

Meagan:
Just jump on a plane and go to China. Go to someplace where people take tea a little more seriously. If you’ve had tea before and it was, and you didn’t think you liked it, I’m going to guess it was because you went someplace that didn’t know how to make it. And even good restaurants sometimes have crummy tea service. You know, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a high-end restaurant and they don’t even give you a saucer to put your tea bag in, let alone why do they have Lipton? I mean, there’s so—.

Andrea:
I was going to say, and it’s Lipton tea every time.

Meagan:
I don’t understand why tea isn’t given the same attention as other beverages, considering how highly— Coffee. Well, and, you know, Americans. Like, we’re even better than Brits when it comes to 65% of us. Obviously. 35% of us don’t use teabags. Try to keep up. No, I think it’s changing. But if you want good tea, go to where the people—go to where people make tea. And a coffee house, like the teenage barista at your coffee shop, she’s probably not, that’s not the place. They’re not, that’s a sideline. It might make them money, but it’s not, they don’t do that. The coffee places usually like coffee. They’re coffee people. So go to where the tea people are and let a tea person make you a cup of tea. They will geek out.

Andrea:
I don’t even know. Where that is

Meagan:
You probably have like what’s your closest big city bellingham bellingham i bet you bellingham has a tea house like a good tea house i’m googling it okay.

Andrea:
So i’m gonna look for a tea house that’s what

Meagan:
I’m gonna yeah look for a tea house um there is a place called 11th hour in bellingham that’s tea and coffee bar so they do both but they put tea first which tells me it’s a good sign you know well what about this willowbrook manor english tea house and farmstay Actually.

Andrea:
Gary’s told me about that. He keeps saying you should take the girls and go to like tea.

Meagan:
Yeah, just go someplace where they take it seriously. And let someone make you a really good cup of tea and describe to you what they’re doing. And I think you’ll see it a little bit differently.

Andrea:
Wonderful. All right. Well, thank you, Megan. I’ll see you in the after show. And to everybody who’s listening, thank you so much for listening. Megan, your book is going to be out when people hear this. And where can people find it and the title of the book again?

Meagan:
The book is The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read, How We Let Our Kids Go and Embrace What’s Next. And that should be out now and is available anywhere books are sold.

Andrea:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Megan. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can join as a patron. Choose from various levels starting at $5 You can see what we offer at AncestralKitchenPodcast.com While you’re there, check out our favorite books, supplements and kitchenware Or give a one-time donation Leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts And if you know someone who would love our show, tell them about us You are helping to bring ancestral food wisdom into modern kitchens Changing the world, one plate at a time