Tea Me Up, Calm Me Down

When I had a market-research job in college, I was assigned to go door-to-door giving away tins of Tetley Tea. I found that it was almost impossible to give it away. Most people felt the same way I did: Traditional tea seemed staid, Brit, and altogether unhip. What was hip was a new Portland product called Stash Tea. "Stash" was slang for a drug cache. "We targeted colleges," says Stash co-founder Steve Smith, chuckling. "That's why we called it 'Stash.'" At Reed College, kids would get Stoned Wheat Thins in the mail with one package of crackers removed and replaced with hashish. Some stored the hash in Stoned Wheat Thins tins; others preferred Stash Tea boxes. Even if you just used it to store legal tea, Stash made you feel your whole world could be a Grateful Dead concert.

Flash forward 30 years. Most folks have probably stopped storing hash in Stash Tea boxes. The pot connotation is history. The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, who used to ply highways at supersonic speed dodging giant hallucinated dinosaurs with Neal Cassady at the wheel, has slowed down. What does he imbibe before every concert? Kombucha Wonder Drink, an oolong tea concoction brewed by Smith's old Stash co-founder, Steve Lee. "It used to be Wild Turkey . . . and other things," says Smith, delighted that Weir has come to the tea party. And Bob is not alone! Specialty tea sales are growing at around 20 percent or so, while the more generic teas—Lipton and things of that nature—have been pretty flat and declining." Smith's own new tea company, Tazo, got snapped up by Starbucks, and sales last year, not only in 5,000 Starbucks outlets but in department stores and elsewhere, were up twice as much as the specialty-tea average.

It's not that people have quit drinking for effect. It's just that the desired effect of a potation is no longer to see Shiva with a thousand undulating arms and the grinning head of Howdy Doody. Now, a generation once lost in space wants to feel more firmly rooted in a healthy place. When Smith invited a Gypsy to his then-deserted 6,000-square-foot Portland warehouse at the dawn of Tazo to read his tea leaves, she told him, "You know, in my language, 'Tazo' means 'river of life.'" Whoa! Soon after, Smith and former partner Lee took a walk and experienced a simultaneous revelation of the only possible slogan for Smith's company: "The reincarnation of tea."

In a sense, they're also reincarnating the old Stash spirit, only what consumers are after now is to calm down, not freak out. "Our approach is to honor the inherently healthy attributes of tea with names that were more mood states than flavor descriptors," says Smith. "Calm. Zen. Om. Awake. Refresh." Tazo isn't the only tea out for enlightenment (and 40 percent growth). My kitchen cabinet overflows with infusable pharmaceuticals: Easy Now Tea and St. John's Good Mood Tea from Traditional Medicinals; Good Earth Tea for Sleep, Mood, and Tension; Kava Stress Relief from Yogi Tea Healing Formula.

"I wish we could say more about the [health] benefits of tea," says Smith. "At a meeting recently of the Tea Association, we were talking about how we can ratchet up the message and, y'know, challenge—I don't want to say challenge the FDA, but ratchet the message up a little bit, be a little more overt." It's a tricky position: Psychoactive teas usually bear warnings that the FDA doesn't endorse their salubrious effects—and then go ahead and make great claims.

Many experts cautiously endorse the claims, with caveats. "Kava is by far nature's most effective tranquility-producing herb," says Chris Kilham, explorer in residence at Amherst's Medicinal Plant Program and author of the book Hot Plants. "Valerian is a calming agent and will help people to sleep. Passion flower is also effective, though it will not make you feel sleepy, just relaxed. Hops is quite mild but possesses some significant anti-inflammatory properties." Smith singles out valerian and kava: "Valerian is more of a sedative, and kava is more of a mood herb—something that really mellows you out, less of a sleep aid and more of a mood aid."