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By that I mean the potpourri-style American herbal blends that were popularized in the 1970s -- Celestial Seasonings, San Francisco Herb, Montana Tea & Spice (creators of the "Evening in Missoula" blend), etc. Vaguely medical but mostly recreational. They're a big part of American tea history, so I thought they deserved their own thread.
Re: Hippie blends
Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2022 1:11 pm
by wave_code
Celestial Seasonings' history goes pretty far out and back around again... including connections to a new age UFO cult and a very disturbing advocacy for eugenics https://www.foodandwine.com/drinks/slee ... -behind-it
Re: Hippie blends
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2022 2:54 pm
by mbanu
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Some of Celestial's first carton packaging, courtesy of the package-designer. Lemon Mist and Brazilian Breakfast are both long discontinued, but can still be found in a modified form through Celestial's old competitors, like St. John's Botanicals (https://www.stjohnsbotanicals.com). When the original is gone and all that's left is the copy, does the copy become the new original?
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A lot of the artwork for the packaging was done by the late Rance Barela.
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An example of some non-tea artwork for a band that played at the 1977 Bluegrass & Country Festival in Telluride, Colorado.
(Also, an example of their music -- maybe useful for framing what was going on in Colorado at the time.)
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Not sure if this was another Rance Barela package, but the back is fairly helpful...
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Mostly because it partially gives away the secret that allowed Celestial Seasonings to pull ahead from the other hippie blends, "natural essential oils and flavors". They would spike their herbs with essential oils of that herb in imitation of higher-quality herbs, while the standard health food shops mostly used pure herb blends. So in this case, I imagine it would be cinnamon with cinnamon oil, orange peel with orange oil, cloves with clove oil, sweetening their licorice root, etc.
Celestial Seasonings' history goes pretty far out and back around again... including connections to a new age UFO cult and a very disturbing advocacy for eugenics https://www.foodandwine.com/drinks/slee ... -behind-it
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There was a lot of that going around -- Rance Barela, for instance, was part of The Divine Light Mission, the U.S. branch of Divya Sandesh Parishad, headed by Prem Rawat, the teenaged son of guru Hans Jī Mahārāj.
Re: Hippie blends
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2022 12:52 am
by mbanu
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One style worth calling out is "Mu tea" (sometimes Moo tea or M.U. tea) -- this was an herbal blend developed by George Ohsawa that became a part of the early macrobiotics movement in the U.S., as described in his 1965 book, You are all Sanpaku:
George Ohsawa wrote:MU TEA
This is the most Yang of beverages. It contains the legendary herb ginseng -- the most Yang of all herbs used to make tea and fifteen other medicinal plants: peony; root of Angelica; sea thistle; carthanne; rush; ginger; hoelen; japonica; licorice; cinnamon; bitter orange rind; rehmanial radix; moutan cortex; carophyll flos and persical semen. The word mu means space or infinity in Japanese, and Mu tea is so named because it is the beverage for development of superior judgment. It is usually obtainable only through macrobiotic channels and comes in small packages. Open a package and pour the Mu tea into 32 ounces of cold water. Bring it to a boil and let it boil from five to ten minutes. Here again you will discover for yourself what amount of boiling best suits your taste. If the Mu tea is being prepared for someone who is very Yin, the water should be boiled away to make the tea stronger -- until there remains merely 16 to 20 ounces of the original 32. This will be enough for two days. It can, of course, be reheated each time it is served. Mu tea is another delicious and exotic introduction to macrobiotic foods for friends and skeptics who have tried everything -- from cannabis sativa to d-lysergic acid diethylamide. For children who need to be withdrawn gradually from orange juice and other sugared drinks, Mu tea can be spiked with a few drops of natural unsugared apple juice. Give them less and less apple juice in their tea until they come to appreciate the delicious Mu flavor completely on its own.
Supposedly this was the blend that got Mo Siegel interested in herbal tea back in 1969 -- free cups were offered to shoppers at the store he sold band posters through in Aspen, Mother's Tea Parlor and Natural Foods Shoppe. I'm not sure, but I also think that one of the original Celestial Seasonings blends was a pun based on this. Instead of "Mu's 16", we get "Mo's 36". Most of the big shops seemed to have their own version, even if they were not macrobiotics specialty stores.
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San Francisco Herb called theirs "Mu Zest", for instance.
Re: Hippie blends
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2022 8:06 am
by mbanu
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Another is the somewhat odd-sounding combination of alfalfa and mint. I think the first seller was California Alfalfa Products, now known as Alvita (https://www.alvita.com/). This was an herbal tea grandfathered in from earlier health-food movements (you can spot the San Francisco Herb version, Alfa-Mint, in the bottom right corner, the box with the person sitting on a mushroom playing a flute).
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Celestial Seasoning's alfalfa-mint was "Mellow Mint", which also added papaya, comfrey, and licorice.
Another old competitor, Portland's Dragon Herbarium (https://dragonherbarium.com) has an alfalfa-mint loose-leaf, as does St. John's. I think Celestial discontinued their version after it was discovered that habitual recreational consumption of comfrey could cause liver damage.
Another old competitor, Portland's Dragon Herbarium (https://dragonherbarium.com) has an alfalfa-mint loose-leaf, as does St. John's.
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Dragon Herbarium might be the original source for "Love Tea" -- Dragon was known as Love's Herbarium under its original owner, Richard Love. Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
When the original is gone and all that's left is the copy, does the copy become the new original?
Another frequently copied blend is "Lazy Daze". This was apparently one of two blends produced by a company called Golden Sun Inc., "Lazy Daze" and "Gentle Nites". I'm guessing that Gentle Nites was a competitor to Celestial's popular nighttime blend -- hard to tell, as Golden Sun seems long gone. Not sure about this, other than the name registrations, the internet seems convinced this never happened.
*Edit: Starwest Botanicals (Star and Crescent Herbs) has it as spearmint lemongrass, elderberry, rose buds and petals, linden flower and leaf, chamomile, raspberry leaf, and orange peel. (https://www.starwest-botanicals.com/laz ... -4-oz.html) I can't find any older companies selling this blend, which makes me think that maybe this is their original and they are just a very successful b2b reseller.
One style worth calling out is "Mu tea" (sometimes Moo tea or M.U. tea) -- this was an herbal blend developed by George Ohsawa that became a part of the early macrobiotics movement in the U.S., as described in his 1965 book, You are all Sanpaku.
Supposedly this was the blend that got Mo Siegel interested in herbal tea back in 1969 -- free cups were offered to shoppers at the store he sold band posters through in Aspen, Mother's Tea Parlor and Natural Foods Shoppe.
If anyone is curious, here is a brief biography of the old owner of Mother's Tea Parlor & Natural Food Shoppe, Roy Rickus.
Not sure if this was another Rance Barela package, but the back is fairly helpful...
Mostly because it partially gives away the secret that allowed Celestial Seasonings to pull ahead from the other hippie blends, "natural essential oils and flavors". They would spike their herbs with essential oils of that herb in imitation of higher-quality herbs, while the standard health food shops mostly used pure herb blends. So in this case, I imagine it would be cinnamon with cinnamon oil, orange peel with orange oil, cloves with clove oil, sweetening their licorice root, etc.
I think this commercial shows the other part of the secret -- as the 1980s progressed, they made an active effort through advertising to de-hippie their teas, or as this one's slogan puts it, "Herb Teas... more tastefully done." Most of their competitors did not seem to try to make this transformation.
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Maybe some good context -- a lot of these hippie herbalists weren't formally trained, they were pulling it together themselves through interacting with their peers. From a 1991 interview with Rosemary Gladstar, one of the founders of Traditional Medicinals.
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This is the sort of tea they were up to in 1975, a special blend sold to fund the anti-nuclear movement. Other teas were "High Time", "Morning Upper", and "Back to Reality".
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By 1985 they were a little more functional-oriented, not quite as extreme a de-hippification as Celestial Seasonings was going through, but not Nuclear Casual Tea.
This is the sort of tea they were up to in 1975, a special blend sold to fund the anti-nuclear movement. Other teas were "High Time", "Morning Upper", and "Back to Reality".
As for what SoNoMore Atomics used the funds for, I suspect it was to pay the bands that came to their rallies, folks like Aircastle.
A box of Smoker's Tea, circa 1988, if anyone was curious about the ingredients and preparation. Maybe compare with its Chinese contemporary, West Lake Stop Smoking Tea. (http://www.itmonline.org/jintu/smoking.htm)
Celestial Seasoning's alfalfa-mint was "Mellow Mint", which also added papaya, comfrey, and licorice.
Another old competitor, Portland's Dragon Herbarium (https://dragonherbarium.com) has an alfalfa-mint loose-leaf, as does St. John's. I think Celestial discontinued their version after it was discovered that habitual recreational consumption of comfrey could cause liver damage.
This also hit Traditional Medicinals, I think. In 1990 they were featured negatively in a syndicated newspaper article that mentioned issues with both comfrey and lobelia.
Alexis Beck wrote:For one woman, a Boston-area business owner who considers herself nutritionally conscientious, a cup of comfrey tea, intended to ease her chronically upset stomach, turned into a frightening bout of stomach cramps, diarrhea and eventual dehydration.
Credited with purifying the blood and easing stomach ailments, this herb in the form of tea is available in health-food stores despite the fact its safety is classified by the FDA as "undefined." It contains an alkaloid, lasiocarpine, which has induced liver cancer in rats and can poison the liver, according to pharmacist Dr. Varro E. Tyler in his book, The Honest Herbal.
An extreme example of marketing herbal teas involves a group of teas manufactured by Traditional Medicinals of northern California. They are available in health food stores and supermarkets under such names as "Smooth Move," "Smoker's Tea," "PMS Tea," "Weightless Tea," "Mothers Tea," "Pregnancy Tea," "Female Toner," "Easy Now" and "Herbal Pharmacy." But more than half of them, on closer examination, turn out to be classified drugs.
This company is a food company and a licensed drug company in the state of California and can, as a result, include herbs in their teas that are otherwise banned from foods.
The most striking example of this is in the company's "Smoker's Tea," which contains lobelia, one of the 27 herbs considered unsafe for food use by the FDA because of the alkaloid lobeline, which allegedly acts as a substitute for nicotine without the addictive side effects. But according to the FDA, lobelia is a poisonous substance, an overdose of which can produce vomiting, sweating, paralysis, a rapid but feeble pulse, and in extreme instances, coma and death.
"The concentration of lobeline in even a box of our tea will not have a toxic effect if taken according to our package directions (1 cup every hour not to exceed 12 per 24-hour period and should not be used for more than 6 weeks) but will make eliminating nicotine easier," says the company's vice president, Lynda Sadler, who is also a past president of the American Herbal Products Association.
While the FDA agrees that the two-tenths of a milligram of lobeline per cup is not likely to be harmful, according to Paula Fairfield, its effectiveness as a nicotine substitute is questionable at best.
If I had to pick a year for the end of the "vaguely medical, mostly recreational" era of 1970s-style hippie blends, I think 2001 would probably do, as that was the year that the Food and Drug Administration withdrew its approval of comfrey tea, and a report was delivered to the U.S. Senate titled, Swindlers, Hucksters and Snake Oil Salesman: Hype and Hope Marketing Anti-Aging Products to Seniors.
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Re: Hippie blends
Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2022 4:12 pm
by mbanu
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So did the hippie blends have their own tearooms? Yes, sort of. The most famous was probably The Good Earth chain of restaurants, as their blends became popular enough that they were sold away from the restaurants as their own thing.
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It would probably help to know that their most popular blend was a spiced rooibos with ingredients like ginger and cinnamon, something that might help with digesting the relatively heavy food. (They also offered a tea-based version.)
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(Maybe helpful if you have puzzled over why there are so many flavored rooibos teas today, when the standard South African way of preparing it is to just boil it plain and then add milk and maybe sugar.)
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Some staff from the Palo Alto branch in 1981.
They did de-hippie a little for their commercials during the mid-80s, mostly through focusing on the food rather than the staff. I'm not sure how well it worked, as most of the branches ended up closing. I think there are two left in Minnesota, run by Phil Roberts... Palo Alto closed in 2001.