We're not exactly a sleepy little tea company these days.

In fact, we've always got something brewing (sorry) around here. Recently we mailed out samples of our Açai White Tea to some volunteers we found on Facebook and Twitter, because we want them to tell us if they prefer what's in our current sachets, or if they like a different sample we sent them, since we're considering changing the formula. If you'd like to be a part of our tea tastings in the future, stay tuned to our Facebook page and follow our tweets — pretty soon we'll be trying out new versions of Tropical Goji Green and Orange Sencha, and looking for feedback.

This afternoon, Richard was dumping a pile of what looked like potpourri onto a piece of paper — turns out it was actually our Alpine Berry Herbal Tea blend, but a sample with much larger pieces than what typically appears in our sachets. And then he started tasting it against a sachet of Alpine Berry. Typically, when tasting tea you brew it at double strength, so what he ended up with were three cups of tea that had the thick, bright red color of cough syrup. And when we tasted them, boom — they were packed with big berry flavor. (It makes sense — Alpine Berry is air-dried berries and fruits. I'm sitting here eating big pieces of apple out of the larger pieced sample right now. That sounds weird, but they taste good and I'm hungry.)

So, why did he need to taste these against each other? "The bigger pieces would look so pretty in a sachet," Richard said. "We've got the beautiful sachets, so we might as well make use of them." Well, it turns out that he prefers the taste of the Alpine Berry mix in smaller pieces anyway — the smaller pieces have more surface area, so they lend more flavor to the tea.

Also this afternoon I held a blind taste test with Richard to determine if it really matters if you squeeze your tea bag (or rather, sachet) into your mug after steeping. Stay tuned — we'll be writing more about that in the near future, including the results of our blind taste test.

Finally, this last weekend the ESPN Winter X Games were held just up the road from us at Buttermilk Mountain. Marketing manager Bess Hammer went on her own extreme adventure, and coincidentally spotted Richard hiking up the Highland Bowl at Highlands Ski Area on Saturday, so they made the hike together. Überfit Richard took pity on Bess and actually carried her snowboard up to the top of the bowl (the summit is 12,382 feet and not exactly an easy hike). At the top, Richard's friend Kim brought out a thermos and served some steaming Açai White Tea from two leaves and a bud, of course! Here's a great photo of Richard and Bess once they made it to the top on this beautiful, sunny day.