For the Wounded & the Lost (Baker Street Blend, Elderberries, Vanilla)

This tea didn’t start with a moodboard, but the reclamation of the tea from the fandom where it originally found a home and a name did.

And that works on many levels. A friend began the process of its creation and its return was similarly assisted by a treasured human.

The beginning of this tea was a request from the mentioned friend regarding a loved and discontinued tea. She wanted to see if I could make a my-way version of it, as she both had faith in me and expected that the my-way version would outstrip the original.

The testing and research indicated that I would have to start by creating a foundational blend of black teas. That tea became Baker Street Blend and was the first in the now long line of tea blends made out of just tea that are then used to make other teas.

If you had told me then how many latchtins of my own just-tea blends I would end up having on hand for further creations, I would have been dumb-founded, confused, and a bit disbelieving – because I was deeply intimidated by the concept of doing so.

There is much gratitude in me for the path this tea started me down.

Once I had the foundational worked out to my satisfaction, the elderberry and vanilla of it was relatively easy to deal with. They were both ingredients I was already quite friendly with, as elderberry is one of my dried fruits, and as such, is easier to wrangle than any of the freeze-dried and vanilla was one of the favourite flavours of a person who was quite dear to me at the time, so had been high on the list of “to learn.”

It had needed a new name long before the reboot of my shop and life occurred, but the reboot gave me the impetus to set it and all of its siblings and cousins in name aside so they could be properly dealt with and reclaimed.

For the Wounded & the Lost is one of the last remaining, because there were things about the concept and framework that named it that were difficult for me even before the world that provoked the fandom became a Huge Pile of Nope.

Conversations with the second mentioned friend about it allowed me to distill the essence of what I was actually looking for from a name for this tea.

I wanted it to still be about coming of age stories, and about the ways in which we are damaged and the ways in which we can heal – both on our own and with help, and I wanted it to touch on how hard that can be, and I wanted it to appeal to those who had been betrayed by the Huge Pile of Nope, and I wanted it to somehow encompass all of that.¹

And, as if often the case, she had a moodboard for that.

Rather like I frequently have a tea for that, or could make one. (Because when she doesn’t have one, she has that same tendency and skill with all of her arts.)

Even better, that moodboard was attached to the series of books that has been consuming much of my tea-making brain since I read them. The October Daye series, by Seanan McGuire.

Attaching this tea to McGuire’s work seemed especially appropriate as she is an author who owns her mistakes and missteps and learns from them and evolves rather than forever doubling down on them until a human being turns themselves into a living pile of examples of what not to do with one’s life.

The interchange of ideas and thoughts ended up going beyond this tea and Chelsea herself, and led to thinking about a generation growing up in a different kind of Faerie, and what my friend created as a result of that interchange is an absolutely gorgeous piece of art that inspired me to open wiki tabs and dig through my quotes file and take down notes for a potential tea. If you’ve read the Daye series you will understand what I mean when I say that some of the scents offered are challenging to think about creating or referencing as safe and tasty flavours. (Especially when combining several into one concept.) (We’ll see if I can make it work.)

This tea, though, is broader in scope, and is about the path leading to that hopefully different kind of Faerie.

Or about the path leading to a world where mutants are accepted and have the same scope of rights as anyone else.

Or about the path leading to a world where justice exists equitably, where the cracks people fall through have been appropriately mended – even if that means the structure has to be destroyed and completely rebuilt.

Or about the path forward, even after the kinds of loss and tragedy that leave the type of scarring that you have to work to relimber what is under the scars, in whatever way is appropriate for the type of damage taken, whether physical or not.

For now the tea rests primarily with October and the people that are hers, but there are many names from many worlds that could fall under its umbrella.

Now for the basics:

Organic Ingredients: Baker Street Blend (Keemun, Earl Grey, Russian Caravan), Elderberries, Fair Trade Roasted Vanilla Powder

Batch Size: 3.3 oz, approximately 93 grams, 35+ servings of tea

LatchTin Batch Size: 6.6 oz, 187 grams, 70+ servings of tea

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag or Tin), Latchtin, Latchtin Refill), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag), Latchtin, Latchtin Refill

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