Arbor Teas’ Co-Founder Interviewed on a “Tea”ter-Totter!
In advance of our upcoming trip to the World Tea Expo this week, I had the pleasure (and privilege) to be interviewed by Ann Arbor’s very own Homeless Dave. But here’s the thing… Homeless Dave conducts all of his interviews on an adult-sized teeter-totter! The interviews are then transcribed and posted to his website, Teeter Talk. Since I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on social and environmental responsibility at the World Tea Expo, Dave and I spent a bit of time talking about Arbor Teas social and environmental commitments, as well as many tangentially-related topics. Click here to the read the interview!
May 28 2008 | Green Business and Media | 1 Comment »
Over the years, we’ve seen interest in Kombucha grow remarkably, so we thought to ourselves, “boy, our customers need to hear about this stuff!” Kombucha (occasionally called “kvass” or “Russian mushroom tea”) is a highly sweetened probiotic tea fermented using a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (or “SCOBY”). This kombucha “mushroom” (also called a “Russian tea mushroom”) is a pale, rubbery zoogleal mat of yeast and acetobacters. The yeast break the sugar’s sucrose into fructose and glucose, then converts the glucose into alcohol. The several species of acetobacter, in turn, convert this alcohol into acetic acid (i.e., vinegar) and gluconic acid. The gluconic acid smoothes the finish of the acetic acid, suppressing much of the vinegar’s harshness. The result is a sweet, tangy, fizzy, lightly caffeinated beverage with almost no alcohol (generally less than .5 percent), and measurable amounts of L-theanine, an amino acid found in all brewed teas and shown to reduce mental and physical stress.
Get ready iced tea lovers, because June is National Iced Tea Month! To get you ready for this special event, we thought it’d be worthwhile to share a quick overview on how to brew iced tea. If you’re not already familiar, making iced tea at home is a total breeze! Just steep your tea normally, but use half the amount of water. If you want to drink it immediately, pour the double-strength infusion directly over a glass full of ice. Or, to refrigerate it, dilute the infusion with an equal amount of room temperature water. This allows the tea to cool gradually, which helps avoid clouding caused by chilling most teas too rapidly. One quart of iced tea generally requires about 1/2 ounce tea. To sweeten, add sugar or honey while the tea is still hot, allowing the sugar to dissolve completely.