About

I like drinking tea. I always had fond memories of the little tea bags of lemon tea that my father drank when we were young. I also tried coffee around the same period and came away with stomach pain for the rest of the afternoon. Doesn't help that the rest of the family always drank it strong enough that the spoon would stand up unassisted. Nowadays I can go for an Irish Coffee or an Espresso Martini, but that's it.

So recently when I was on vacation, walking around a market there was a stand selling teas and of course no blends, just very nice pure teas and a very nice salesman. On the ride back, I started thinking "How hard would it be to make your own?", just need to source some quality tea and some ingredients, which isn't that hard. But it should be quality, so would need to get ahold of some calabrian bergamot oil for example, hmm. And if we're doing all of that, why not be a bit more creative. What else could I put in? What would make an interesting combination?

Or, wait a minute? What have people already tried?

So as always, instead of focusing on the core problem of possibly, maybe, making a tea blend, I thought about building a small database of the existing ones.
This is the result of that.

I picked a couple of brands (sorry if I didn't catch your favorite!) that I think would be interesting to compare, built a pipeline to scrape their websites and spent a lot of time trying to figure out a good taxonomy for the teas and ingredients, and cleaning the raw extracts. There is most likely mistakes in the processing still though.

And let's see if I find the inspiration to start up some tea-based alchemy in the kitchen later.

/PV