Desert Sage Natural

Back in December 2020 I ran my first Build-a-Tea project.

There’d been a few preliminary circumstances where I asked for a die roll for which tea journal or which page within a tea journal to choose when working up a new tea.

This time, assisted by a tea survey, I’d taken a look at my ingredients lists and wanted to create something with one of the ones that was under-utilized.

This turned into a set of connected tweets where I asked for die rolls to choose between options.

It was fun, it was engaging, it was distracting, and it gave me a fun jumping off point for making a new tea.

The famed (or infamed, depending on who you are) neolithicsheep didn’t have dice to hand, but did have a set of well-timed collie tail thumps to offer, which was appropriately random, and I liked the idea of Beamer assisting with the creation of a tea in his own special way.

But it didn’t seem fair to match up the tail thumps and the dice, so the project turned into two separate teas.

For one of them, the tail chose the foundational tea I used. Red Rooibos. For the other, the dice did. Roasted Kukicha. The ingredients they share are Tulsi and Lavender.

Naming Beamer’s was relatively easy. The Collie Has Spoken.

The other one took a long time to nail down a name for. There’d been a variety of lovely suggestions for names, many of which have been put in my list of “names seeking teas” – but none of them felt quite right to pair with The Collie Has Spoken.

There’s a process and a vibe and some rules for paired teas, and not all of these things are things I can adequately explain in detail. Sometimes names just don’t fit and they don’t fit and they don’t fit until suddenly I trip over the one that does.

In this case the second tea’s name was sparked by the implosion of Twitter. I discovered a lot of cool things and people and books and music and patterns and inks and webcomics and…

…through the communities that found me there and took me in.

I don’t remember now (and due to the mess that Twitter has become checking directly is hard) whether the book recommends led me to Shep or if Shep was first or…

…but part of the circle of humans that I saw interacting with Shep a lot was T. Kingfisher, author of The Twisted Ones.

A handful of months back I was staring at/through my bookshelf, thinking about various names that were dog connected that had been suggested for the companion tea to The Collie Has Spoken. The Twisted Ones wasn’t up there, but Dying with Her Cheer Pants on was, and I read them in the same chunk of time and there was a cascade of thought that led me to Bongo, the hound that plays a resonant part in The Twisted Ones.

I’m a sucker for a good dog, real or fictional.

Combine that with the fact that the book made a definite impact on my brain, and we were definitely heading for a tea name. I enjoyed it, and it was also a rarity, with horror, as parts of it crawled inside my mind and took up residence. Some of them still live there.

I’d put up a poll in my tea naming server but Bongo’s Unfortunate Adventure came to mind after it closed and clicked in so resoundingly – that it over-turned the poll’s results. (Frankly, it was a tie, so I didn’t feel too horribly about it.)

Bongo’s Unfortunate Adventure linked the pair of teas perfectly, for me, in a variety of ways – one of them being saluting some of the best parts of what Twitter once was, and some of the gifts those best parts gave me.

Now for the Basics:

Bongo’s Unfortunate Adventure

Organic Ingredients: Roasted Kukicha, Tulsi, Lavender

Batch Size: 1.9 oz, approximately 53g, at least 30 servings of tea

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample, (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)

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The Collie Has Spoken

Organic Ingredients: Red Rooibos, Tulsi, Lavender

Batch Size: 2.6 oz,  approximately 73g, at least 30 servings of tea

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample, (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)

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I have an expansive list of ingredients, and adding new ones is one of the ways in which I keep the work of hot beverage creation challenging and interesting. It is also one of the things that allows me to finesse salutes to a wide variety of characters, stories, and other avenues of inspiration. Sometimes an addition to the toolbox is driven entirely by an inspiration I am pursuing.

However, not everyone has tastes as expansive as my ingredients toolbox. Which is fair. Every time I look at the list in my spreadsheet I am slightly boggled by the length of it. “I really use this many things in tea?”

My current Tea of the Month Club is no-holds-barred on ingredients choice and usage. Which means everything from chile to chocolate to dandelion flowers to more savory herbs and spices is fair game for the teas that will be sent.

It was suggested by someone I respect and trust that I should have a version of the club for the Shirefolk who don’t carry the Tookish spirit of adventure: sticking to recipes that use ingredients more generally recognizable for tea.

Problem is I started this work on the medicinal side, and that combined with my experience cooking means that I don’t really have a good concept of what is normal or gentle or standard for tea.

Which means I need help.

Which is why I created this survey.

Responses will be used to create a list of ingredients for this other version of the club, so I can have more than one level of accessibility and access offered for the monthly shipments.

I appreciate the assistance.

Δ

Today I did a seemingly simple thing. I took the paperwork inside of a hanging file folder and moved it to the top of a pile that sits on a pair of sizable three ring binders, for filing.

The hanging folders are where I keep the survey data for my Tea of the Month Club humans. Along with any personal notes, important emails, everything that isn’t strictly the choices of tea and the hard-copy tracking of payments and shipping and time-frames and all the other little moving parts and actions that make the Tea of the Month Club happen.

It’s a thing I’ve done before. Sometimes people get overwhelmed with tea, sometimes they decide the way I do tea isn’t for them, sometimes I never find out the why.

Today, when I set those papers aside, there were tears. I was actually tempted to take some time and see if just crying for a little while was in my repertoire today.

I didn’t end up doing that, but what I did do was promise myself that I would write something later on in the day, to express why there had been tears and what thoughts those tears provoked.

I cried today because I knew why that customer had gone dark. Her son was good enough to reach out to me after I sent a letter to check on her (emails were bouncing, and we’d corresponded outside of the language of payment and product) – to let me know that she’d passed.

Some of the places the sadness came from I can’t talk about in specific because they are part of a story that is not mine to tell.

But I can talk about the part that is purely mine.

And that is that when you are a small crafter the people who come back over and over again and show up for you, support you in what you do – they matter. You think about them, you remember them, their preferences, their orders, they stick with you – even if it doesn’t progress beyond that.

There’s one guy out in California who has been a member of the Tea of the Month Club for long enough that it throws me, a little, every time I do the math. For one, because he’s still with me, and for two because I have that many distinct teas. And even though I haven’t had the kind of interaction with him that I have had with many of my other solid and consistent Tea Humans, there’s still meaning and joy in the fact that he continues to opt in for more tea every month.

Then there are the ones who are mostly quiet, but occasionally send me a message or say something alongside a reskeet or weigh in with wise words when there’s a day on the rougher enough end that I bitch about it in public. Some of those messages get snipped and printed out and stuck to the tea cabinet or stuck in my desktop backgrounds folder, so they will jump-scare me at random in the best possible way.

And then there are the lovely humans that became friends along the way, despite the paranoia of overestimating the depth and meaning of interaction that infuses being a person who is the everything for a business. (There are not infrequent arguments and worries inside my head about that kind of thing.)

The woman who passed was part of the chronic illness community back on Twitter in the days before it became the digital cousin to the Cybertruck. Eventually she became part of the weird little tea community that existed in that space and helped me name and create and let me share the joy of the making of things.

We lost touch for a bit after the events that led to the reboot of Desert Sage Natural, and when she did find me again, she was a level of happy that was a gift in and of itself.

Because she was one of the lost names I had worried about, that I had wondered about, in the aftermath of the first years of covid and the disintegration of those various communities. And we hadn’t been close enough that I felt comfortable using the information that I had as the Business to reach out as the Worried Person.

Anyway, the TLDR of this is that when you show up for a creator, of whatever media, you help fuel us. And not just with paying us for what we do, though that is awesome and supportive and please, if you read this and would like some hand-crafted geeky hot beverages, drop by the shop…

…but in the more ephemeral ways, too. It has gotten harder and harder to be a creator of things, these past years, and the current administration and the proponents of AI and the various slingers of garbage that cannot actually replace what the human mind and hand and spirit can create continue to try to find new ways, new pressures, new “facts,” new “inevitabilities” to increase that difficulty.

And the choice to push back against that and choose Real People and Real Art makes a bigger mark than you might think.

And we see you. And you matter.

More than you may know.

So, thank you, from one micro-business owner to all of you out there keeping writers and artists and crafters working and hopeful and paid. One can create from a place of spite and vitriol, but it’s nice to have positive motivation and energy to work with, too.

The story of this tea began years ago while watching an episode of Luther with someone who, as it turns out, probably wasn’t the safest individual to intake distressing content around.

There was a sequence in the episode that reached into one of the deep wells of unpleasant experience in my head and stirred and splashed and sent me spinning into that space that isn’t quite a flashback but isn’t quite not a flashback, and I couldn’t get a handle on it.

Until I grasped at one of the more traditional coping mechanisms and decided I was going to make myself a cup of tea.

There’s a reason why it’s a traditional response to things and part of it is the rhythm and the pattern and the process and the sense memory of the act of making a cup of tea.

I didn’t want just any tea, though. There was a tea idea that had flickered into my mind while I was spinning in that flashback/not-flashback/emotions-from-another-time space and it felt like it was The Answer to getting out of that space and back to something more akin to my usual mental balance and resiliency.

This is the tea that came out of that series of moments. There’s something soothing for me in what genmai adds to tea, Splinter’s Brew contains my two favourite green teas (to date, at least), and the scent and taste of nutmeg evokes comfort and memories of safe places. I can’t really tell you why the rose, and I couldn’t have when I was creating the tea, either. I just know it was the right thing then, and it is part of a lovely and helpful tea.

Dissociation Shuffle became the name (and puts this tea in a special category) when I mentioned, offhand, on one social media site or another that I shouldn’t name this tea Dissociation Shuffle because it was a terrible name for a tea.

As happens with fair frequency when I make that sort of comment about a tea name, it stuck, and it suits, so it stayed.

Organic Ingredients: Splinter’s Brew (Roasted Kukicha, Gunpowder Green), Genmai, Rose Petals, Nutmeg

Batch Size: 4.21 oz, approximately 119 grams, at least 45 servings of tea

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)

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Occasionally I find myself with a blending day where I don’t have anything time sensitive to do and sometimes (though rarely) this coincides with a day where I do not currently have any Ideas that Insist on Existing oscillating frenetically in my mind.

This tends to lead me toward the many many pages of the Tea Journals that have scribbled notes for an idea or a name or a flavour combination, sometimes with some math – sometimes not.

But approaching those mostly empty pages could feel a little overwhelming back when there were 5 Tea Journals, much less now, when the one is use has the number 11 on the cover.

The easiest solve for that overwhelm is dice. And I like seeing other people’s dice. I also like involving my tea humans in the selection process, even when it is completely random.

A long time ago (2019) in a now defunct social mediaspace (Twitter) I asked if I could get a couple of dice rolls to choose journal and then page of journal so I could have a little playtime creating a new tea.

In a disconcerting turn of events, two friends rolled dice, and their dice spoke in a chorus separated by hundreds of miles and several countries.

Those rolls led to this tea.

There was no question that it was the one to play with, and the name followed relatively swiftly on the heels of the dice.

The Chosen Tea. Doubly so.

A refreshing combination of rooibos, sage, lemon, and mint – it was a tea that surprised me with its tastiness and is a resonant memory of two dear friends.

Organic Ingredients: Rooibos, Lemon Peel, Sage, Peppermint

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)

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This year has been made of years, or so it has felt for me and for many of the people in my social circles, from the inner all the way out to the fringe edges of social media interaction.

2026 is going too fast, too slow, and is full of Things To Process. Coming at speed.

And it felt like March needed something simpler to represent it. Something meant for a little you-time, a little comforting shared-time, a little creating-time, a little bit of something somewhere that allowed for a recharge.

So I chose Take a Breath. It is one of my simpler teas, a foundational blend of just black teas, and the intent of it was reading nooks and rocking chairs and knitting or a couch and a blanket and a good book or really whatever relaxing activity gives you back a little energy, a little life.

If you are curious to find out more about why that tea and what March provoked in the longer-than-usual tea letter, signing up for the Tea of the Month Club gives you access to the archives.

I’ve made a few attempts at making a SereniTea for myself. None of them had managed to do what I needed them to, be something I Really Wanted to Drink, and be things that I could consistently give myself permission to drink daily all at the same time.

Raven’s Rest is a lovely tea and it does help with my anxiety and it is tasty and I do enjoy it – but it counts as both a special treat tea and a dessert tea and that means it’s not a daily drinker for me.

Damage Shield came closer, even though it wasn’t specifically created with the intent of being ‘my’ SereniTea, but it has cardamom which puts it in that special treat column again.

I like flowers in tea, but not really on the daily – those, again, tend to be sweeter dessertier teas and that’s not my day to day preference.

A while back I was grousing about how I could do this thing for other people and make things that worked and fit the right niche in their day to day but I couldn’t do it for myself, and it turned into a conversation and during that conversation one of my housemates asked me a very helpful question.

“Given how you feel about sweet things, have you considered making something not sweet?”

In and around the question he pointed out that prior attempts had been guided by someone who hadn’t actually paid a lot of attention to my actual tastes or the things I am still working on from past traumas that become even more roadblock-like when I’m having a panic attack or when I’m dancing on the edge of a flashback or when I’m so tense from the internal litany of garbage that I can’t hear any other thoughts.

So I rewound my conceptualization of me and a SereniTea all the way back. Starting from scratch. And I asked myself “what foundational ingredient do I have that doesn’t have caffeine that I like the taste of and doesn’t require Permission to drink when I’m stressed.”

And the first answer was chicory.

I love tea in all the variants I have tried, and it is where I started with the work of tasty hot beverages. But in my life I started with coffee.

Back when I didn’t sleep because sleep meant dreaming and dreaming meant reliving things – and at the time I didn’t have tools for breaking out of the kind of nightmare that is basically a flashback while I’m unconscious – coffee was one of the tools I used to avoid sleep.

Later on, during the time when I was working full time and doing all the cooking and cleaning and running of a household as well as being the forever GM for our almost nightly game sessions – coffee was the tool I had for dealing with the fact that I didn’t sleep much.

Coffee was a friend and an ally, and took whisky well, and for a long list of reasons flavours adjacent to it are a comfort.

One of the many reasons why chicory was used very early in the process of creating chocolate teas and why it shows up in so many different blends across the array of my work.

So I started there. And I let myself think outside of the constraints laid out by the first person to push me to make a SereniTea for myself. I ended up with one that is definitely a horse of a different colour when compared to every other SereniTea I’ve made – a tea that took notes from my enjoyment of Ask Not the Sea Her Secrets and borrowed a vibe or two from Engineering Spaces and Fathoms Below and acknowledged and celebrated the fact that I like putting things like seaweed in tea.

The person referenced was right that those tastes are not for everyone, but one of the reasons I have so many teas is that I’m not a one size fits all kind of person, as far as the way I think.

And I, personally, am certainly not everyone’s cup of tea.

Perimeter Check came together after the medical mess that happened last year – and all the names that came to mind for it were born out of the darkest and driest corner of my sense of humour. It’s how I cope with things like almost dying.

I put it to a vote in the Discord server, but Perimeter Check was a front-runner, in my own mind, from the beginning, because of what the Murderbot books had meant to me and done for me when I read them. Chewy in ways of self-realization and comforting in ways that I might write a whole other post about at some point.

I can drink it every day and I do and I enjoy it and it helps. If you’re looking for something to take a little bit of the edge off of a too sharp brain and flowers and chocolate and mint aren’t the first places you go when looking to relax, it might help you too.

Now for the basics:

Organic Ingredients: Chicory, Hawthorn Berries, Oatstraw, Tulsi, Dulse, Lemon Balm, Passionflower

Batch Size: 3.3 oz, approximately 93 grams, 40+ servings of tea

Containment :Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin)), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 Teabag Sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag))

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Fandoms are complicated.

Sometimes this is about aspects of the content, sometimes it is about revelations regarding the creator, sometimes it is about angry not fans or angry fans or…

…and sometimes you have to leave one behind because of things you learn or because of things that are Writ So Large in reality that it taints, covers, and eradicates the original reasons you engaged with it.

However, there are connections and communities and friendships that can start within a fandom and then grow well beyond it.

This tea was made for a friend that I shared several fandoms with, some large, some small – but she had a particularly deep love for one that I have had to excise from my inspiration set. Now that I have dipped a few toes into the fanfiction world, I am near certain that my friend was a reader of fic and I wish that I had known to ask questions back when that was still an option, because knowing what fic she enjoyed would have given me a better and deeper understanding of what aspects of that fandom had spoken to her and whether it was primarily the original works of the author or the ways in which people improved upon the world that had been created.

This tea is an amalgam crafted from my friend’s personal tastes and their copious opinions and feelings about one specific character – even down to the visual aesthetic of the tea.

Not the first time she inspired a tea that was on the more intensive end as far as the skill and effort required – she commissioned the first (and, so far, only) colour-changing tea in my catalog to salute one of the members of her long-running D&D game – his favourite spells, his chosen colours – and I spent a day using every clear glass container I had access to to test initial brew colours and PH of a good portion of my ingredients list – so I could properly fulfill the intent of the gift she wanted to give.

We traded tastes of Germany for tastes of New Mexico, and she introduced me to a regional tea and the method of preparing it – that I rigged up a version of before I’d ever had a chance to taste it – and she was somehow both shocked that I’d managed to do it justice and unsurprised that it turned out to be within my skill-set to do so.

‘Always’ as the name for the tea came fast on the heels of its creation. It started because of an incorrectly attributed quote, but these days I think of it with a dash of Fox and the Hound – and an understanding and appreciation for how deeply the best of friendships can mark you – in the good ways when you can still speak and laugh and introduce and inspire and care and empathize and love and learn… and in the ways brought by the aftermath of losing them and the myriad manifestations and wounds of grief.

Dasmiest (her Twitter handle, back before the blue bird became a billionaire’s echo chamber, as that’s where we talked most frequently) died in 2021 – it was sudden, it was unexpected, and it wasn’t covid.

I miss her, and I wish we’d had more time, and she is one of the reasons that I hope that the days when my brain is an atheist are the incorrect ones, because she is a person I would dearly love to speak to again – bonus points for the fact that the framework of communication would not be merely digital.

But, for now, I will remember her when I brew certain teas. I will remember her when I read certain books. And if I reach a ripe old age and am still sitting and knitting, maybe next to a fireplace if climate shifts leave us that comfort – I will always cherish what we shared.

Organic Ingredients: Corvid’s Caravan (Keemun Black Tea, Golden Yunnan Tea, Lapsang Souchong Tea), Fair Trade Roasted Cacao Nibs, Elderflower, Cinnamon, Tulsi

Batch Size: 3 oz, approximately 85 grams, 30+ servings of tea

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin)), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)

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Years ago, back before the little blue bird app turned into an example of why billionaires shouldn’t exist, a conversation on it led to the phrase “grey green minty envy.”

I’m not sure why that phrase stuck in my head so hard and so fast, but it did, and the fact that it did lent weight to the thought that I should make a blend that involved Earl Grey and some sort of green tea.

I’d tried a few different takes on the concept, during the early years when I was still too intimidated by the concept of blending Different Teas together, but none of them hit the “I want to use that to Make Things!” spot.

More recently a wander through the tea journals reminded me of my desire to make minty envy, and the first step was to make the foundational grey green blend. The smoke came into play because it feels relevant to the experience of a variety of strong emotions, though I will admit that my love of smoky teas and specialization in their blending was probably also a factor.

The naming process was shaped by the timeline we are currently being assaulted by, and are witnesses to, and led to a list of potential teas.

Hope Defiant. Minty Envy. Sparkling Anxiety – so many possibilities, and I am curious to see which ones take solid and tasty shape.

Organic Ingredients: Gunpowder Green Tea, Earl Grey Tea, Lapsang Souchong Tea

Batch Size: 3.5 oz, 99 grams,  40+ servings of tea

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin)), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)

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