nosh | tea
HOW TO FIND
THE PERFECT TEA
BY ALLISON ROORDA
You’ve probably heard great things about health benefits of drinking tea. People now know about different kinds of tea — green, white, rooibus — as well as herbal tisanes that promise less caffeine than coffee and positive ingredients that have health benefits. So what is the healthiest tea? According to Bill Waddington, owner of TeaSource, the healthiest tea is any tea that you like. “We get the question all the time, which tea is healthiest,” Waddington says. “The healthiest tea for you is the tea you like, because then you’ll drink it all the time and stop drinking Pepsi and coffee.” Waddington says his TeaSource stores in St. Anthony, St. Paul and Eden Prairie are very careful not to advertise teas that promise certain health cures or disease prevention. He is more concerned with helping people find that perfect cup of tea to enjoy. Tea has become increasingly popular over the last decade, which might explain the new increase in stores like TeaSource that sell a variety of loose leaf tea. Neal Grasdalen, co-owner of Indigo Tea Co. with his wife Annie, says there are a couple of reasons for the increase in popularity. One is health reasons; with the aging population of baby boomers, more people are looking for new ways to stay healthy. But Neal also sees a lot of young people getting interested in tea. “I think with that group, they’ve seen it all when it comes to coffee,” he says. “I think in the tea market, we’re seeing things happening, where years ago, people were brewing tea in teabags. Now people are buying loose tea and taking it home to brew, moving more into a gourmet direction.” Indigo Tea Co. in Burnsville has 200 types of tea available to buy or to drink in the store. “I think it’s almost evenly split between
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NOVEMBER 2013 | savvy.mn
black teas, green teas and herbals,” Neal says. He also noted black teas still outsell everything else, partly because many people looking for tea were previously coffee drinkers and are used to robust flavors. Green teas are popular, but Neal says women tend to like flavored teas and men tend to like unflavored teas. TeaSource has a couple ways of finding teas for customers. The stores offer tea classes to teach about customs or pairings with tea as well as tea sample days, where the store offers a deal of five cups of different teas at once. Sometimes customers will come into the store looking for a specific ingredient in their tea, Waddington says. “We’ll help them find one that they enjoy,” he says. “They’ll say I’m looking for lemongrass tea or rosehips tea. We carry a lot of herbs. Then we can very simply point people to the herb they’re looking for. We help them find a tea they like with that certain ingredient.” Waddington encourages customers to do their own research either by going to their doctor or other health care personnel or looking up studies from organizations like The Tea Association of the USA or The United Kingdom Tea Council. He also encourages customers to find a tea they like to drink. “Then you don’t treat it cod liver oil,” he says. “When you do the research, it all says tea is phenomenally healthy with basically no side effects.” Waddington says the list of health benefits from tea is so long, it’s phenomenal, but he does ask people to familiarize themselves with legitimate sources before looking for teas that promise to cure cancer.
Allison Roorda writes for Savvy. Send feedback to editor@savvy.mn.