History Of Our Beverages

Food, its personality, quality, texture, flavor, its symbology, how and where it grows, migrations, medicinal nature, culinary uses, it’s influence on world history and cultural evolutions and how it makes us feel when we eat it is deeply fascinating to me. I have always been amazed at how a particular food smell can transport us immediately back into a particular moment our childhood, to a romantic diner, make us feel empowered and create a moment of intoxication with life or complete aversion.

Over the years I have noted through my travels, medical studies and culinary experiences many interesting and common ways foods work together and have created a list of food that I consider to be extraordinary members of our edible plant and animal world.

The ingredients used in these living beverages and the nature of the beverage being alive, contain foods and herbs from those lists and a style of food production which generates life giving properties. All the ingredients of these beverages have powerful, beneficial effects for our mental and physical well being.

This is a product which I hope will enhance the lives of the people who drink it.

I would like the consumption of food to be shared, to generate a feeling of joyfulness, health and healing, connection to food traditions and lineage and to inspire an acknowledgment, curiosity and respect of the earth from where the food was produced.

The modern diet, a highly processed foods diet has been saturated with products that have lost their living nutrient qualities and ability to nourish us deeply. Living foods have served as the basis of whole food diets globally and have slowly disappeared from our tables over the past fifty years. These are the foods that have been linked to strength, endurance, strong constitutions and long life.

Our unique, naturally fermented beverage calls upon the traditions of ingesting a living, raw, enzymatically rich food source to support optimal health and well being while serving as a refreshing and uplifting tonic.

Nettle Brew

I first learned about nettles after traveling to India and Nepal to seek Buddhist teachings when I was nineteen. I learned about one of Tibet’s greatest saints and poets, an 11th century ascetic, Milarepa who made disastrously dark mistakes as a young man in his life and then realizing his errors, became a skilled meditator and attained enlightenment after many years of faithful devotion, perseverance, and monumental forbearance. During one phase of his mountain retreat, he lived on the broth of nettle soup as his only source of nourishment. It has become such an important association with this saint, that paintings of him depict him as having a green tinge to his skin as a result of his nettle diet. Every time I eat stinging nettles which are my favorite green leafy vegetable, or drink nettle tea, thoughts of awe and wonder about his great man and his amazing feats inevitably manifest in my mind. His life is an inspiration and example of one who moved a mountain to transform his painful life. Information about Milarepa can be found in the book:

Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, Greatest Poet Saint to Appear in The History of Tibetan Buddhism

Sarsaparilla

When I was a little girl, we lived several years in the heart of the country, on a corn farm in Decatur, Illinois. Some of the happiest times of my childhood I experienced during those years. I remember feeling incredible joy swimming in the two feet of dried black eyed-peas that were stored in the loft of our great red barn and opening milk thistle pods and blowing the seeds making wishes as the silk threads drifted away. In particular, I remember going downtown and smelling the rich aroma of the soybeans roasting in the large soy factory and going to my uncles general purpose store that had an old fashioned soda fountain stocked with seltzer water and ice cream. I would bask on an oasis of childhood bliss drinking cherry cola and my very favorite sarsaparilla soda which I love to this day. I think those memories inspired the creation of this recipe for our beverage line.

Hibiscus

I discovered hibiscus flowers in my early twenties when I trying to develop a recipe for a cooling beverage to serve during a meditation retreat in the middle of a very hot and damp Connecticut summer. I stumbled upon this big beautiful flower and decided to experiment with it. I was delighted and surprised at both its magnificent color and thirst quenching and refreshing effect on the body. Our beverage is based on a recipe that I began creating almost twenty years ago with ingredients that pair beautifully with hibiscus, lemon and ginger.

Wolfberry, Lycii Berry, Goji Berry

My introduction to this sacred fruit occurred during my Chinese herbal studies in New York during my twenties. This was a time I was not only learning about the healing properties of herbs and acupuncture, I was also beginning to understand that every food we eat, where and how it was grown and how we cook it also have unique healing properties. I was enraptured with this information and lycii berries were exceptionally interesting because they crossed over the herbal line into the kitchen and could be used not just in herbal decoctions but as part of our everyday culinary arts. Likened to an Asian raisin with longevity granting properties, these mountain fruits are used in desserts, meat stews, alcoholic infusions, salads, and teas. Gaining in popularity just recently here in the West with greater knowledge of the life giving properties of foods, lycii maintains a position at the top of the super food hierarchy.

The other member of this recipe, rhubarb, similarly is used as a strong herbal component to Chinese medical formulas and as a culinary ingredient. It has a strong association with spring and looks like a female version of celery. Having a powerful cleansing property due to its bitter flavor, rhubarb has been traditionally paired with sweet fruits and is most widely recognized in the US as an integral member of the strawberry rhubarb pie.

Two years ago, I traveled with my son to Lapland and was intrigued by a new fruit I had never heard of or tasted, cloudberries. True to their name, they are the most extraordinary fruit my son and I agreed, that we had ever tasted. Heavenly! I happened upon a beer there that paired cloudberries with rhubarb that was simply delicious. I knew in returning to the US, I would never have access to the arctic cloudberry but I played with the concept with the two fruits we use for our beverage, the lycii berry and cranberry and think we have a close cousin to what I tasted in the icy north.