Hine Herbary

The website health.com recently published a list of the Top 10 Healthiest Types of Teas. They include:

1. Green Tea
2. Black Tea
3. Peppermint Tea
4. Chamomile Tea
5. Oolong Tea
6. Dandelion Tea
7. White Tea
8. Rooibos Tea
9. Hibiscus Tea
10. Ginger Tea

We were happy to see several of our favorites on the list, along with several teas that we currently stock. We’ll have loose leaf oolong tea for sell at the Farmer’s Market this year, along with boxes of 10 count tea bags in several varieties including Hibiscus Mint.

The various herbs that are often blended in teas to add flavor have all kinds of healthy properties that can aid in weight loss, lower blood pressures, help fight heart disease and some cancers, relieve anxiety and stress, and much more.

A brief history of tea from the National Library of Medicine:

The second emperor of China, Shen Nung, is believed to have discovered tea when the leaf of the plant Camellia sinensis blew into his cup of hot water (2737 BCE). The first European to encounter tea and write about it was the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Father Jasper de Cruz in 1560. Around 1650, the Dutch introduced several teas and tea traditions to New Amsterdam (which later became New York). The first tea sold as a health beverage was in London, England, at Garway’s Coffee House in 1657. In 1826, John Horniman introduced the first retail tea in sealed, lead-lined packages. In 1870, Twinings of England began to blend tea for uniformity. The Englishman Richard Blechynden created iced tea during a heat wave at the St. Louis World Fair in 1904, and the New York tea importer Thomas Sullivan inadvertently invented tea bags in 1908 when he sent tea to clients in small silk bags and they mistakenly steeped the whole bags. Finally, the world’s first instant tea was introduced in 1953.