Sure you can drink tea but what else can you do with it?

The World Wide Web is chock-full of alternate uses for tea; some good, some bad, all entertaining. Here are a few:

1. Soak your feet in strong tea bath to get rid of unpleasant odors.  You can also try the same for your dog by brewing up a strong footbath of black tea, it will strengthen the pads of your canines feet – that is, if you can manage to persuade them to stand still for longer than a second.
2. In the same vein as stinky feet, tea can also help eliminate stinky fish hands, just run lukewarm tea over your hands after working with fish.
3. Steep chamomile tea in a facial steamer and indulge your skin in an herbal facial.  And although we’ve all heard it a million times, cold tea bags help relieve puffiness around the eyes.
4. Use hot teabags on canker sores or fever blisters to help draw out infections.
5. Cooking with tea – that’s right, you can cook with it too. Here Ceremonial Matcha is a delicious sounding recipe for seared duck breasts with a citrus-tea sauce courtesy of Emeril and foodnetwork.com:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/seared-duck-breasts-with-a-citrus-tea-sauce-recipe/index.html

You can also use tea as a spice. Just grind tea leaves of your choice (a quick survey of internet recipes mentions the use of green, red, and oolong teas) with a mortar and pestle or in a food processor along with basic spices of your choice: salt, pepper, thyme, paprika, etc. to make a delicious tea spice rub for chicken, steak, pork, or fish.

Another great trick: try mixing a teaspoon of matcha green tea powder – like Art of Tea’s Matcha -  into a pint of vanilla ice cream until well blended for an at home version of green tea ice cream.

Perhaps the most entertaining and unusual use for tea comes from lifehackery.com, a website that offers “Useful, Unusual and (Sometimes) Ironic Tips and Tricks to Hack Your Life into Shape.”

“Not sure what to do with your old teabags? Get the normal hanging plastic device but swap out the insides with a tea scent of your choice – there are plenty to choose from and it will almost certainly beat out ‘lemon mist.”

Working on goal setting with our team is always invigorating and motivating for me. The first five minutes of our group meetings are usually a bit sluggish but after everyone warms up we generate ideas that are shared and passed around the room in a proactive dialogue.  Our group voices concerns and new concepts regarding organic teas, the direction of organic beverages, and organic botanicals.
In these meetings it becomes clear that there are specific issues regarding organic teas that need to be solved on a company level as well as on a global level.  How can we make an impact with loose-leaf tea and organic bagged teas? Do our customers feel a difference if they are making an impression on a Tea Growers life? How can we measure a sustainable tea projects success?
The problem, of course, is turning a question into an answer. It’s easy to state a goal but to create movement, change, and results one must follow through with action like incorporating a new tea to a line or choosing between an organic tea or non-organic tea. When Art of Tea was born we took a look at the whole picture.  If we feel that a product won’t create a remarkable lasting impression it doesn’t leave the warehouse. Roughly 10% of the new blends we create make it to our list each year, if it doesn’t hold up in our blending facility than it won’t go out to our dedicated customers. We test out new teas and we are truly grateful for the honest and open feedback our loyal customers provide us based on the samples they receive in their orders. Through your thoughts and comments we continue to grow and fulfill our company goals and meet our customers demands to add more organics to the list. We experience a full sensory experience based on solid ethics and quality care.
We made a clear choice that our core product line would be organic and we intend to continue to grow as we plug on through the continuous certification process. We create our organic teas and organic herbal blends based on taste, quality, organic origins, and overall benefits…a tea or tisane (herbal) that you can go back to time and again.