Design A Tea – 3 Cups of Fabulously Yummy Tea

The slogan at Design A Tea is where Tea Leaves Dream.  How cute is that?  It’s actually very fitting because the man who found this tea company opened it based on a dream!  Brian used to be a paramedic until one night he had a dream in 2006.  This is how the dream goes

I was walking down the rural road I grew up on. I passed an elderly lady who was cooking something on a small fire in the ditch. As I approached her she asked me if I wanted some apple tea. An odd question I recalled, because I seldom drank coffee let alone tea, but being polite I reached down and took the cup. I drank it and told her, “This is great tea.” She replied with, “Of course it is, you created it.” Thinking she was a crazy old lady, I handed her the cup back. As I did this the dream slowly started to turn from black & white to color. I turned and continued to walk down the dirt road. Soon after I awoke.

I love this story because I’m always encouraging people to follow their dreams and this is a literal example!

The concept behind Design A Tea is very simple.  You choose your base tea, pick your favourite flavours and they send you your custom blend!  How cool is that!  Each person is entitled to 2 free tea samples as long as you pay the small ($1.00 or so) shipping cost.  Brian was kind enough to send me my two tea samples and a bonus sample that he concocted.  My two teas were A Rooibos Tea with Caramel & Pecan and a Rooibos tea with Zabaglione & Cassis.  The rooibos were organic grade from South Africa.  Bonus!  When I picked the second tea I had no idea what those things were at the time and I thought why not try the most outrageous thing possible and see if it can taste good.  We’ll shortly see.  Brian also sent me a Green tea with Pina Colada & Chocolate.  Dessert teas galore!

The first tea I tried was the rooibos with caramel pecan.  OMG it smells like sweet sugary caramel popcorn.  I wish the internet would hurry up and invent something that will transport smells from peoples computers.  Yum yum.  You can see the beautiful hue that came out after steeping it for about one minute.  Wow.  I’m speechless.  If candied popcorn was a tea this is it.  Holy crap.  I created candy caramel popcorn in a tea.  I should patent this and sell it to Kernels.  Anyways on to the next tea.

As you can see Brian packages the tea samples in individual tea pouches.  T-Sacs I’m assuming.  The next one I’m trying is the Zabaglione & Cassis.  Cassis as I explained in another post is the same as blackcurrant.  Which I am a huge fan of!  Okay this tea has completely different characteristics.  It smells like someone just crushed a bunch of berries with their fist.   I smell a bit of apples on the nose.  The color is a lot darker and redder in tone than the last tea.  Let’s try it.  I love it.  I can’t believe it.  It tastes even better than the last tea.  I wish everyone could taste and smell this.  It’s very fruity but not overpowering.  I can’t believe I made this!

last tea, Brian’s pick.  Green tea with Pina Colada & Chocolate.  The green tea is actually organic sencha from Japan.  The yellowy liquor smells like pineapple yogurt.  Holy crap.  This is good too.  The tastes soo much like pina colada.  I’m not picking up any chocolate notes in the nose, but when you drink the tea the chocolate follows the pineapple.   Wow.  How can something without any sugar in it taste sweet?  Think about that for a second!  I highly recommend these to people who enjoy strong dessert teas and like experimenting.  You definitely have to steep these teas for 5-7 minutes though to get the full flavouring.  Check out their website and Happy blending!  Oh FYI don’t copy me and let the TSac hang off the side, the tea will get on your table!  =)  Cheers.

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Daytrip: Dynamic Greens Wheatgrass Farm and Richters Herb Farm

Today me and Dean went to the Dynamic Greens Wheatgrass Farm in Stouffville about 30 minutes north from my house in Richmond Hill. It was so much fun! When we got there Tom Stem, the owner, gave us 4 cubes of wheatgrass each and dissolved it with a bit of hot water. It was soooo good. Wheatgrass if you don’t know is basically the young grass from the wheat berry seed. Our bodies can’t digest the fibers so we need to juice the grass in order to get all the health benefits of it. It is extremely nutrient and enzyme rich.

Often people who have serious health ailments turn to wheatgrass to boost their immune system and drastically improve their health. If you haven’t tried wheatgrass yet I highly recommend you get your hands on some. A note of caution though, most wheatgrass contains mold on it as it is not properly grown outdoors which will cause nausea or vomiting. Haha this happened to Lilac while we did a shot at Fresh on Spadina in Toronto, Canada. Not good. Even the wheatgrass I grew ended up having mold on it.

The frozen ones aren’t very good quality either even if they are grown outdoor as they can be brown from oxidation. This is why Dynamic Greens is such a great company because they have both air tight packaging and outdoor mold free organic wheatgrass. For $160 you get 200 cubes which is really really cheap. It’s about $3 a shot at a juicebar and it’s moldy! I highly recommend you buy the book Wheatgrass Nature’s Finest Medicine by Sproutman if you want a more in depth look at this amazing and cheap health product. We will definitely be going there again during the spring when the grass is actually growing. I’ll keep everyone posted!

For those who want to learn more about Dynamic Greens Wheatgrass and the great benefits it has on your health please CLICK HERE.

After we left Dynamic Greens about 2 hours later, we went to Richter’s Herb Farm in Goodwood, Ontario. It’s sooooo cool there! There are hundreds of fresh organic herbs growing in huge greenhouses ranging from Mint for your Mojitos to the herb Stevia where the sweetener comes from to Lemongrass (pictured on the right).  Even though it was pretty nippy outside today, it was nice and humid inside the greenhouses.

I felt like I was in the tropics!  It gave me a wide variety of herbs to browse and look through to get ideas for my tea blends so that was really fun and useful. If you love fresh tisane herbs you have to go there, or even dried. Check out their website. I saw in their catalogue that they also have the camellia sinensis plant aka the plant that tea comes from – white, green, black, oolong, pu-erh. So I will definitely be going back to grab one next time I’m there. They also have a lot of free seminars on site! The next one is February 22 on Success with Seeding.

Oh yes I also finally decided on a company name! I registered the domain today, I’m going to register the company as a business tomorrow in Ontario/Canada etc. I’m so excited!

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