Tea Blog

Let’s start with the offbeat news this time around. Does it get any more offbeat than breast milk in tea? Hard to say. I’m not sure who Mylene Klass is or what her claim to fame is. But apparently she’s well known enough that the British press is abuzz of her recent revelation that when she was growing up it was common for her family to use breast milk in their tea. I’ll pass.

Following that, the notion of tea for dogs seems rather mild. This one was also featured in the British press recently and recounted the tale of the clever entrepreneurs who have put together “a new range of premium teabags for dogs.” They’re tisanes really, since no real tea is included, and they’re said to cost about ten times as much as the popular British brand, PG Tips. Barking mad, indeed.

If doggy tea bags didn’t chew up enough of your disposable income, then consider this automatic teamaker type gadget that will set you back about three hundred dollars. Sleek-looking, space-age teamakers are hardly a rarity these days but this one apparently is being endorsed by celebrity chef, Heston Blumenthal. Who, as far as I can tell, is a lot better known on the other side of the Atlantic than here, but there you have it.

While we’re talking pricey tea accessories I would probably be remiss if I didn’t mention this Tea With Georg tea set that comes to us from a Dutch company and is made of 100 percent silver. Of course, silver might not quite be to your liking and so you might be more interested in this 24 karat gold afternoon tea, served at a high-end Indian hotel, in which a number of the items are prepared with edible gold. But alas, while the champagne apparently contains gold flakes as well, there’s no mention in this article about whether the tea does.

Last up, here’s a gizmo that gets my vote for being one of the more clever tea-related items I’ve run across for a while. It’s a drinkable tea calendar made by the German tea company Halssen & Lyon. That’s a drinkable tea calendar, as in you can peel off the calendar entry for each day, steep it and drink it. It’s a promotional item that’s apparently not sold to the general public yet but according to one report the company may make it more widely available.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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