Friday is Black Tea, Floral Tea, Fruit Tea, Chai and Pu’erh Review Day!

Vegetables in tea!?! You heard me right. This white tea blend from Fully Loaded Tea is interesting and enticing from the packaging to the flavor!

I’m not sure if Katya and Olga woke up one morning and BAM! they just knew to use cucumber in a tea, or what. But what I think is that they’re pure genius!

This blend is in a pyramid tea bag (sachet) and looks to have a mix of floral leaves and  carrot pieces, but I didn’t see any cucumber. It brews a beautiful tangerine-orange color. Nice and bright.

The aroma has Cucumber tart, hints of safflower, some spice and carrot and is slightly pungent.

Flavor-wise you deffinitely catch the cucumber, carrot, spice and safflower. Though marigold is on the ingredients list I certainly didn’t catch it. It is slightly sour and clearly vegetal. It reminds slightly of spinach.

The flavor is well balanced, but the aroma is the draw here. Not too bold, not weak, just a well balanced tea. Great for a change of pace and worth a try. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys trying different teas.

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What exactly spurred me to sign up for the World Tea Expo is something I can’t reveal much about at the moment, asside from the fact that it does indeed relate to The Project.

I learned something while out in Las Vegas… though it wasn’t related to gambling, adult inhibitions or travelling. Indelibly I learned that my greatest strength and passion is, and likely has always been, with people. What makes us tick individually. It turns out that this year’s World Tea Expo, for me, ended up being all about the people.

While Saturday certainly marked a wonderful close to a beautiful and full day of tea related adventues… it was the people I met that day which truly energized me. The wonderfully high quality teas and the colorful array of accessories were really only icing on the cake.

I ate breakfast Sunday at the Roundtable All-Day Buffet at the Excalibur. The buffet was just $25 to come and go for as many trips as you’d like within a 24 hour period. My dietician would have been aghast at the prospect if she knew… but what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas… right? I actually ended up eating rpetty well there. Fruit, eggs and grapefruit juice were what appealed to me and I chose rather appropriate portion sizes. In case you’re wondering… I did go back for lunch and dinner… but I had a middle meal during a Tweetup I’ll mention later.

Sunday and Monday were where it was all at. Two more sessions: “Selling Your Tea Online Successfully” and “Creating A Menu With Cost & Creativity in Mind” bisected my morning and afternoon. Both presentations were steller! I couldn’t have been more pleased with the investment I made in paying for these two sessions.

Michael Cramer of Adagio Teas covered a wealth of great information related to community building… engaging and keeping your customers on your website and helping with conversion of simple visitors into customers who buy your products.

Melinda Decker, owner of LaTeaDa Tea Room in Clinton, IL provided an interesting presentation as well. While her ideas mostly focussed on her more traditional Victorian style tea house… she provided a number of robust and reusable ideas for making the most out of the materials you buy, simply by using the same ingredients to make multiple products… such as a cake, cobbler or pie being turned into a dessert in a glass.

I spent the rest of Saturday, literally networking with people. Hitting booths, talking people up over tea, getting my business cards handed out and really just getting to know people.

I ran into Jack Cheng of Steepster.com, Lindsey Goodwin of VeeTea, The fine guys over at Village Tea, Ty Beddingfield of Gamila… the inventors of the Tea Stick and a plethor of other completely wonderful folks on Sunday. Several of these folks, plus Ilya from Adagio Teas showed up for an evening Tweetup after the expo floor closed and we had some grub and drinks. In particular, Ty and I really talked for a while about ideas and things. A wonderful day.

After dinner Sunday night, I hit up Cherry, a dance club over in the Red Rock Hotel. This club was one hell of an experience! I thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent there dancing and admiring the crowd. I really get energized when a club is as alive as Cherry was that night. Rare I think, for a Sunday night.

Now it’s Monday morning. The sun is up… but I’ve been awake for hours already. To protect myself some from JetLag I have always tried to awaken as close to Eastern time as possible. I worked out in the rather meager (by my standards) health club in the Excalibur… an amazingly expensive $20 a day on top of the room bill.

After breakfast at the buffet again, I made my way over to the expo for some tea and my morning session: “Reaching Beyond Your Front Door For Additional Income” and then on to my afternoon session: “Price it Right & Sell it Smart.”

Ronald Eng of Kopius Teas put on a wonderful presentation. Very well spoken with great diction and clarity. His ideas were understandably expressed and he was very energetic about answering questions. A serial entrepreneur, Ronald had some great ideas and concepts to share.

Robert Hedrick of Holton & Heath also had some great insights on proper pricing, commodity vs exclusive and the power of branding potential. This was a also a very good presentation.

The rest of my “day” on Monday was spent scurrying around making my final connections with brands and companies, procurring more business cards in exchange for mine as an attempt to build more outlets and opportunities for me to grow with the tea industry over the next couple decades.

I did end up linking with Ronald Eng and Emilie Yanagi of Kopius Teas, the people at Zojirushi North America, a couple great folks over at TeasEtc, Maria Warman from Art of Tea and I cannot forget Nora of Golden Star Tea who has an amazing sparkling bottled tea beverage presented in a chapagne bottle!

At the end of the day I ran into May King of the new UK tea brand, MayKing Tea as well as a few other friends including Norman who is starting a tea garden in Hawaii! I ended up going out dancing with these two and we had a wonderful time out at Margaritaville down the strip after throwing back a few drinks at Liquidity, a bar in the Luxor Hotel & Casino.

I don’t want to leave anyone out… but I’m HORRIBLE with names… I ended up meeting several hundred people at the expo and coming away with some great friendships made over the three day event.

I have to recommend this event to anyone starting a new tea business, or anyone already in the industry!

I’ve already made the decision to head back to Las Vegas next year for another round of tea education. Maybe by then I’ll already have a small presence in the tea industry and be ready for some thoughts on expanding to becoming a tea brand. Here’s to the future!

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Friday is Black Tea, Floral Tea, Fruit Tea, Chai and Pu’erh Review Day!

I stumbled upon Fully Loaded Tea when looking for methods of liquoring up my favorite cuppa. The story of this young company is inspiring and invigorating in itself, but their blends are of an uncommon breed. While reviewing brands as a whole is certainly something I do, it’s not what this post is about. No, instead it’s on the most interesting blend the delectable entrepreneurial duo has to offer!

I’d not thought of combining a black tea with basil let alone tomato, but that’s just what Katya and Olga had the inspiration to do. The aged disagreement on how to classify a tomato (fruit or veggie) had me a little giddy to see how its flavor would adjust to joining a light black tea. I was both curious and worried how it would turn out.

The primary flavor is definitely tomato. The taste comes out as a light spiced tomato soup at first, which is oddly comforting as a beverage. Savoring each sip is remarkably easy with this blend. On the finish I can deffinitely taste the basil and the hints of both marigold and cornflowers. I’m surprised tomato isn’t used more frequently now that I’ve had it.

The aroma is light. I found it almost too light actually as I couldn’t really notice it past the edge of my mug. Disappointing to say the least given the remarkable energy the flavor extended to my palette. I’m not sure what I could recommend differently here, except to say I’d like the tea to beckon to me lest I forget about it as I work or eat.

The tail of this brew is also light. I wouldn’t mark that as a negative at all in this case. Frugal on the bitterness Tomato Rebel is alluring in more ways than one. The finish does ask you to drink ever more, but the addition of desirable aroma would make this brew irresistible.

Refreshing as a brew, I never imagined tomato would be so good as a flavor in a tea. My worries were certainly appeased upon the first sip. Something about the tomato just helped me relax… and maybe even crave some grilled cheese. I have to recommend this brew to anyone who likes tomatoes, tomato soup , a good tomato bisque or even a V8 veggie drink. This tea is absolutely better than I thought it would be!

One last note is that I do wish this tea were offered loose. Instead Fully Loaded only offers their teas in “pyramid” sachets. While certainly better than using paper tea bags, it’s not as freeing as having it loose. Either way, this brew is worth your time.