In the course of the winter's passing my sweetie has been snookered twice by the tricky naming of teas. The brand that I prefer is
Traditional Medicinals. I send him to the store with tea on the list and he comes home with Yogi brand tea because the names are similar and because the Yogi teas are cheaper.
Traditional Medicinals has IMO the best blends with the most potent herbs in them. Some of my favorites are Throat Coat, Breathe Easy, Herb Tussin and Gypsy Cold Care. I discovered Throat Coat back when I was a raft guide and used to shout myself hoarse trying to get people down the river. These teas have been made for years and they are excellent.
There's this other brand, called Yogi Tea, which makes some decent teas. They have however been trying to steal the marketshare of Traditional Medicinals by naming their teas in parallel ways to confuse the consumer. Instead of Breathe Easy theirs is Breathe Deep, instead of Throat Coat it's Throat Comfort, right down the product line. It has worked twice on my boyfriend so I have had to drink boxes of Yogi tea, repeatedly testing my perceptions. While their blends are OK, they are nowhere near as good as the Traditional Medicinals herbal teas.
Frankly, even though I used to buy some Yogi Tea I have stopped entirely because I do not like their marketing approach, and the ones I did buy from them were not all that good. It seems normal for tea companies to start out making really good teas, then get bought out by some mega-corporation who starts cheapening the ingredients in a cost cutting exercise. This results in reduced quality. It happens in every industry, and I do not know how Traditional Medicinals has avoided it, but it appears that so far they have. I thank them for their quality. I stopped buying Celestial Seasonings a LONG time ago, when their quality took a dive. We used to joke that they were bagging up floor sweepings. If I end up with Bigelow or Stash brand tea in my tea box, it just sits there until I have a guest that chooses them. Tazo is middle of the road in my view. Trader Joe's is about as good as really cheap tea can be. There's a lot of "tea" out there that gives tea a bad name.
Much tea is bad just because it is old: herbs don't stay potent forever. If that box of tea bags in your cabinet has been open for years and collecting dust, the tea inside is not going to be good. Not liking this does not constitute not liking tea.
Full disclosure: I have no ties to any commercial tea manufacturers, other than I work part-time in a
medicinary where we compound our own blends. Nobody is paying me to issue an opinion, but I have one, just like everybody. I think that most people who say "I don't like tea" have never had a really good cup of herbal tea suited to the season and their constitution. I am educated about the medicinal uses of herbs and have created some of my own blends for specific purposes.
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