Birdhouse Tea Company – Muddy Boots
Muddy Boots is, according to the Birdhouse Tea Company, a “celebration of the wonderful walking culture of the Peaks and the embrace of ‘muddy boots welcome’.” Happily, they don’t require you to provide any evidence that you’re a rugged hill-walking type when you purchase it, and will cheerfully sell the stuff to sedentary indoor types. Like myself.
(I have no objections to the Great Outdoors. I’m all for it. It’s just, you know, all my stuff’s in here.)
If you like chocolatey teas – and I think we have firmly established by now that I do – then you would be hard pressed to find a better example than this one. Muddy Boots is a warm, comforting, flavoursome delight. It boasts a refreshingly straightforward ingredients list. There’s tea, cocoa husks and vanilla pods. And that’s your lot
This tea is so very pleasingly chocolatey it made me want to learn a bit more about what cocoa husks actually are. First off, I discovered that ‘cocoa husks’ and ‘cocoa shells’ are the same thing. I didn’t know this. Both terms are used on tea labels. Muddy Boots has ‘husks’ whereas, for example, the Bird & Blend Snowball tea I have on my tea shelf right now, contains ‘shells’.
For some reason, I had assumed that they were two different things. That cocoa shells were the hard shiny outer shell like a hazelnut shell, and husks were something more fibrous-y like the outside of a coconut. I have no idea why I thought this, other than the fact that – as it turns out – I know very little about the Cacao plant.
I’ve now learned that there are three main steps to separating cocoa nibs from cocoa husks. First, the beans are roasted, then they are cracked and then they go through a process called ‘winnowing’ where the lighter husks are separated from the heavier nibs. If your goal here is to make some actual chocolate, then you’re done with the husks at this point. You’ll take the nibs and perform some kind of grinding, mixing and tempering alchemy on them until you’ve got chocolate. But – as we’ve seen from the numerous chocolate-based teas I’ve reviewed on here – the husks are jolly useful things. In addition to being incorporated into tea blends, they are also used in beer making and cosmetics manufacture.
Some tea blends use cocoa nibs as an ingredient. In fact, I’ve had teas that go the whole hog and put actual chocolate pieces in there. But given how damn chocolatey a husk-based brew, like Muddy Boots can be, that now strikes me as unnecessary. What I want is nibs made into big slabs of chocolate and husks turned into chocolatey tea blends.
The rain is pouring down in bucketloads outside right now. But I have everything I want indoors right now. I have books and cats and a delightful cocoa and vanilla tea. My boots will remain unmuddied for another day.
Today’s featured book is Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. I appreciate that muddy boots and ballet shoes are not the same thing but it turns out, I don’t have that many footwear-themed books on my bookshelf.
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