San Benito Tea Company

I was excited to see a local tea vendor on a trip to a farmer’s market near my parents house while visiting California. This market by the way is one of the few places you can now find my all time favorite muffin that I used to eat all the time… the raspberry poppyseed cheesecake by Rebecca’s Mighty Muffins. She used to have a bakery in Santa Cruz where I lived and distributed to a ton of bay area health food stores, but then she decided to close down shop, travel the world and settled down into a much smaller operation when she got back, which leaves a HUGE muffin sized hole in my heart. But I have digressed quite far now… I see tea at the market, they had a cough drop tea and my family was coughing so I decided to give it a try. I believe this was a mistake. I should have stuck with the muffins.

When I steep the tea, I get a piney scent like Pinesol floor cleaner. When I sip it, the first two seconds are fine, but then I’m hit with a Pinesol taste like my mouth has just been disinfected from a weeks worth of dirty footprints. In the last part of the sip a bitter wave crashes through my mouth. I hate bitter. Maybe that is why they suggest adding honey. I was trying to work on the computer while sipping this, but it was just so shocking and distracting that I had to write a review and tell you all about it. It gets a little more palatable as I go on, but not by much. Maybe it’s because all my taste buds have now been killed by pine. I think my cough has slowed down a bit, so that is a plus. I wonder if I can put the remaining tea bags in some alcohol with honey and make a cough syrup type thing that would go down easier and carry a buzz to get me through the taste.

There HAS to be a way to make a tea that soothes a cough and doesn’t taste like you are chewing on a bunch of pine needles. This is unacceptable. I’m going to take a closer look at David’s cold line for an alternative.