May was a hectic month.
The first week of it was the last one leading up to the soft reopen, and I realized, as I was coming down to the wire, that I had greatly underestimated how long it would take to get that first short list of teas rewritten, relabeled, and relisted.
It was also the month where Lost in the Mists was chosen as the standard Tea of the Month Club tea.
It fit with the feelings of reclamation and rediscovery because it was a tea that fell neatly into both of those categories.
One of the tasks I had been (and still am) working on was going through all the old paperwork and making sure the information that I wanted to have in the spreadsheet was actually in the spreadsheet. Catching up COGS for teas that had acquired names and datasets in the interim, entering orders that happened before there was a spreadsheet, and figuring out which teas needed to be completed so that the numbers were accurate and present.
In one case, I found a piece of paperwork from an old, curated Tea of the Month Club set.
It stated that I had sent a chocolate lavender Earl Grey to a Friend and Tea Human.
When I stopped and thought about it, I remembered doing so. I even remembered what the scrawl on the tin had looked like.
Unfortunately, a small test blend appeared to be the only place that tea had ever existed.
That Friend and Tea Human was, quite probably, the only person outside of my old domicile to have ever tasted that tea – until it became May’s choice.
I dug through the Tea Journals. I did a number of both specific and expansive searches on various social media platforms.
I even finally transferred all the bits and bobs and scraps of paper and cardboard and ex-post-it-notes containing scribbled ideas and ingredients lists and names and… 1
…in the hopes that I had written it down somewhere, and it was just tossed onto something that then ended up push-pinned to the old work corkboard or added to the “deal with this at some point” tea ideas ex-journal box.2
The only notation I found for it was the one indication that it had been sent as a tea of the month club tea quite some time ago.
This irked me.
Losing a tea? How dare I!
So, I fixed it.
I recreated the tea, and while I do not know if the ratios I came up with on the second go-round were the same as the first, it certainly tastes good (based on both my own assessment and from Tea of the Month Club feedback) so maybe there was a vague blend-memory remaining.
The way in which it had utterly disappeared made me think of the way in which my current GM deals with people who cannot attend sessions.
They are pulled into The Mists and held there until the driving force behind the character returns.
This tea was certainly Lost in the Mists for quite some time, years, even – and giving it a name that tied in with one of the distinctly happy-making running experiences in this new life chapter made a great deal of sense to me.
Now for the basics:
Lost in the Mists is available as both caffeinated and decaffeinated.
Organic Ingredients:
Caffeinated: Earl Grey Tea, Fair Trade Roasted Cacao Nibs, and Lavender
Decaffeinated: Decaffeinated Earl Grey, Fair Trade Roasted Cacao Nibs, and Lavender
Batch Size: 3.8 ounces, approximately 107 grams, 30+ servings of tea
Options: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)
