Okay, let’s be honest.  You can’t hear the name “Morning Thunder” and not laugh.  It’s a truly epic moniker for anything, but especially for tea.  Plus, it has a bison on the box.  This tea looks like it should give you the strength and energy to fight giants!  I think you can see why I couldn’t not buy this when I saw it on the shelf.  Now, I’ve mentioned before how much I love Celestial Seasonings and that has not changed.  Sadly, they failed me this time.  I did get a pretty good set of adventures of of this new tea, though.

    I brought this into work to try it for the first time because my friend Carla likes different teas too.  I thought, “Cool, we can try this out together.”  Well, I bring it into work, Carla and I both make our cups, and we go back to our desks.  Carla is the first one to try it because, well, I tend to nurse one cup of tea for hours.  Carla, who is the kind of person that always says what she thinks, made a few not-so-subtle comments that implied that she didn’t like it.  One of which was...

    “It tastes like roast beef.”

    I thought she was being ridiculous, so I tried mine.  There was definitely something a little off about it.  I thought it tasted a bit like wood.  That’s when I read the box and saw that one of the main ingredients, Mate, was described as having an oak-like flavor.  Yeah, by oak they mean wood.  That is when Sarah, another one of my painfully honest friends--what other kind do I have?--came by and was told by Carla about the wood-roast-beef-tea.  I showed Sarah the box and she ever-so-cleverly mentioned that Mate might just be another way of saying meat.  Needless to say, that tea did not return to work with me.

    Well, I am not one to waste food or give up on an idea easily.  I tried it again at home, but this time I drowned it in honey.  The taste of honey can be pretty overpowering, so I figured, f I didn’t like the tea, I could at least cover up the taste and still drink it down so I wouldn’t have to waste it.  That did not work either.  It still tasted like wood/meat.  That was when I decided to test it out on the best judges of tea that I know: The English.

    My English friends Sally and Chris to be precise.  In case you don’t know, the stereotype about how much they drink tea is 100% true.  I studied for a semester in England during college and we drank tea 5 to 7 times a day in my dorm.

    “Oh, you’re back from class.  Fancy some tea?”

    “We’re back from the shops.  Let’s have some tea.”

    “What a fun night out dancing.  I think I’ll have some tea.”

    Seriously.

    Anyway, I bought the tea last during the summer, and Mike and I travelled to England the following November, so I made sure to bring it with me.  I warned Sally, so I was really glad she was still willing.  Sally thought it was “foul” (direct quote), but Chris actually liked it!  Then again, Chris is even more open minded about food than I am, and that is saying something.  So my Morning Thunder found a good home with Chris across the pond.  Happy endings happen after all, even for weird, wood-meat flavored teas.