When did Morning Thunder lose its buffalo kick?

I remember Morning Thunder from the 70s and 80s- one cup was enough to blow off the top of your head. My mother drank tea and coffee and she said that MT was much stronger than coffee. I found that it made me too nervous, so I stayed away from it.

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In the 70's I drank Morning Thunder. I even imagined a television commercial for the tea.

The setting: circa 1840, in the Western United States, a flimsy wooden shack with porch sits in a valley on a fairly broad plain

Morning Thunder is being prepared by an elderly wife for her elderly husband as they sit on the flimsy porch

in the background there is a bit of dust and a rumble

The action: as the wife serves Morning Thunder and as the husband begins to drink, the rumble becomes increaslingly intense, the house shakes, the husband' eyes bulge out, and a huge herd of bison stampede around the house, kicking up plenty of dust

there is a voice shouting: Morning Thunder which echoes off the mountains that form the valley

the camera focuses one powerful Bison whose image fades into the powerful Bison on the side of the Morning Thunder Tea box

--Marshall

I drank a lot of it back in the mid 70's. All self respecting freaks had some stashed away somewhere. It was a novel alternative to some other not so legal substances. Never really paid attention to the yerba maté part back then, I was just after the stimulant effect. While I don't remember a quoted caffeine content I do remember that it was considered to definitely be more potent than coffee.

I remember this description on the side panel

"This blend has the power of a thousand charging buffalos. So when your get-em-up won't, Morning Thunder will!"

Mike Petro snipped-for-privacy@pu-erh.net

When I first started drinking tea several years ago, a friend of mine recommended Morning Thunder as an alternative to coffee. I tried it and liked it, though it didn't seem to have nearly the same amount of caffeine as coffee. This was mid to late 90's...

I like yerba mate though, I drink it when I shovel snow for that extra boost. Oh yeah, tastes good too :-)

-ben

"David Sewell" asked:

I never heard that there was caffeine added to it, but certainly heard that mate can deliver significantly more caffeine than coffee (perhaps with the exception of espresso or "Turkish" coffee). I always drank it with honey to cut the smoky taste.

Have you asked the Celestial Seasonings folks?

Warren

Yep. No response yet.

Stashed away... That reminds me: nobody ever answered a question I posted on this newsgroup back in '97. So, courtesy of Google, here it is again.

================================================================== The Stash Tea Company of Portland, Oregon, has been around since the early '70s. I always assumed that their name came from what "stash" would have meant to, say, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. But lately I've noticed that their premium tea boxes carry a little history about how great clipper ships sailed around the globe in the 19th century carrying precious tea, concluding:

Picked from the top two leaves and the bud of the tea plant, then specially dried and graded, these precious teas became known as the "Captain's Stash", his private reserve. We gave this same name to the premium line of specialty teas that today carry the Stash label.

Okay... only problem is, the Oxford English Dictionary has nary an entry indicating this as a 19th-century meaning for "stash" as a noun. In fact, the OED entries for "stash" as a noun don't appear until the Supplement, and they are pretty much what you'd expect: attested as early 20th-century criminal slang in the U.S. for "hidden goods", and acquiring the specific meaning of narcotics by the 1940s.

So is there any basis for the "captain's stash" story, or is it an attempt to give respectability for what was originally a young company's idea of a clever countercultural name?

To answer the question- yes, captains did have their stashes of tea. They also had stashes of wine, beer, and ale. Coffee, too. In the Aubrey/Maturin series, Aubrey is always having food and drink brought out from his private supply. These were goods used to entertain officers and visitors aboard ship, and to keep the captain happy during long sea voyages.

In fact that's what the whole Mutiny On The Bounty revolves around: the Captain's barrel of cheeses....one or two had gone missing (perhaps to his own home, it was never established who did the actual pilfering) and, because the 'captain's private reserve' was also (in this case) supposed to be available to the botanists (who were dunnage until they got to where the breadfruits were) and it was a Navy vessel, someone, not Bligh, must own up to taking them because there was no way Bligh was going to admit it...if he did take them, that is. And that was in Portsmouth or Southampton (IIRC) and set the tone for the whole trip culminating in the mutiny.

And the reason 'Stash Tea' takes its name is from this practice and that the tea brought back thusly was supposedly of a higher grade than the tea brought back as general cargo.

--Leigh

Question is, were they *called* "the captain's stash"? As I noted in the original question, the use of the term "stash" as a noun in this sense seems to date from the 20th century. If you search "captain's stash" on Google you get about 10 hits, none historic. And for the heck of it I just searched for "stash" in some of the full-text databases of English fiction and drama we have at my university. Nothing connected with captains turned up. (The word "stash" appears 3 times in "Moby Dick", but always as a verb, as a synonym of stow or hide.)

I still think that a company founded in Oregon in 1972 probably wasn't thinking about clipper ships when they named their bulk herbal tea "stash"!

DS

Yes, but the question is really about the word "stash" itself and when it orginated.

noun stashes

1. A hidden supply or store of something, or its hiding-place.
2. drug-taking slang

A supply of illegal drugs, especially cannabis. Etymology: 1940s as noun 2; 19c as noun 1; 18c as verb

The question should not be "when?" It should be "WHY!!!!!?" If I wante a more relaxing tea, I would drink one of their other fine herbs te blends. Morning Thunder used to make me jittery, but I expected that; need to wake UP in the morning

- Message posted using

Sorry to disappoint all you aging hippies but in reality maté has very little caffeine compared with even a half decent black tea.

Pomilio et al (in Phytochem 13(4):235-41. 2002) tested 14 brands and bulk maté and found caffeine levels of 0.78 to 1.35% on a dm basis (steeped for 5 minutes). Equivalent for a typical UK black tea blend is 3%. Maté theobromine was a tad higher than tea at 0.31 to 0.66% but even combined (their physiological effect is similar) maté could only boast 2.01% of "thunder" - more a "morning zephyr" compared with a Kenyan clonal at 5-6% caffeine.

True that, like coffee the caffeine in maté is "raw" and its effect is not softened by the counterbalance of polyphenols and theanine as it is in tea. But as for its thunderous performance I suspect the power of Celestial's advertising rather than the much hyped but totally incorrect myth about the caffeine content of maté.

Incidentally the work of Pomilio is not alone in showing a low caffeine content for maté. Filip et al (1998) showed 1.9% (boiled in water for 20 minutes) and Saldana et al (2002) showed just 0.3-0.6%

Nigel at Teacraft

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: snipped-for-privacy@virginia.edu (David Sewell) Date: Jan 24 2004, 9:36 pm Subject: When did Morning Thunder lose its buffalo kick?

I've purchased Celestial Seasonings' Morning Thunder tea off and on over the years, since the days when it was nearly the only bagged tea with yerba maté that you could find in the U.S. I had always vaguely remembered that a bag was supposed to have the caffeine content of a cup of drip coffee, around 100 mg. And a Google search of old Usenet postings shows that it had the reputation of being even more potent, or perhaps nefarious; the FDA and/or one or more states were rumored to have banned it sometime in the early '90s. (I do remember it went missing from the shelves for a while.)

Whatever the case in the old days, it's currently simply a blend of roasted maté and black tea. And according to Celestial Seasonings' website, an 8 oz. cup contains 40 mg of caffeine, significantly less than the 65 mg in a cup of their pure organic black tea.

I'm pretty sure that the original formulation had added caffeine to bring it up to coffee strength. Does anyone know when it changed? (The amusing thing is that some of the recent Usenet postings are still referring to it as if it were a dangerous drug... I wonder if any aging hippies furtively stick it in their shopping carts when no one else is looking, feeling mildly guilty...)

Hi, 16 years later I ask the same question, after a 40 year absence.

I recently (2020) discovered it and have been loving it all year - I love a really strong tea with a great taste. Then just before Thanksgiving I bought a box of it and the effects have gone limp. The box with the maroon label was great, I thought maybe the new black label meant even more caffeine, but it definitely feels like less. Celestial Seasonings, you've done me */_so_/* wrong.

I miss the old CS tea boxes. They had the illustrations in th perfect spot for stacking as decorative acoutremont in one's kitchen. Did Morning Thunder used to have chicory back in the 1960s? I miss the way it used to taste when I was a 70s teenager. It was stronger then and a box was around $1.29. loved the heavy waxed paper box linings. Quotes on the outside of the boxes. -Sigh- If I could travel back in tkme, Id drop into the 70s for a little pre internet, pre postmodern vacation.

I had a similar experience in 70s ( in my teens) and 80s (in my 20s). Back then I drank tea almost exclusively. ofee was an ocasional treat. MT tea was a bigger kick than many other black teas on the market, even more so than earl grey from a local european grocery, which was darned strong. I miss the earlyMT and have been trying to find a way to duplicate it

I believe the taste of Morning Thunder is far less unique than it was in the '70s. Now in 2022, it seems so bland. I'm certain the "formulation" has changed. It's disappointing.