When did Morning Thunder lose its buffalo kick? (2023 Update)

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.

[In this case the 'Captain's Stash' was RN paid for, but in private vessels the Captain of the vessel usually had set food and drink aside both going out and coming home (not to mention various non-food items picked up enroute...), and the tea brought back as the Captain's own fits into this catagory.]

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

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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.