Aug 25 2020 29 mins 9
Danielle Spinola has been serving her specialty tea blends to Pittsburghers since 2007. In 2016, she expanded Tupelo Honey Teas and opened a plant-based cafe in Millvale, returning to her hometown and working to build community with an emphasis on sustainability and collaboration. In this episode, she gives an excellent tea explainer and discusses the health benefits of the beverage. We learn her views about plants as medicine and the level of care she and her team take when blending and selling tea to customers. Is tea, well, not your cup of tea? Spinola takes a “thinking outside the box” approach to tea and her business, which means that her blends are often used in collaborations with local breweries and distilleries for some harder-edged drinks. The episode concludes with her latest collaboration project: She is foraging in Girty’s Woods each week to create a tea used to raise money for the Allegheny Land Trust’s purchase of the 155 acres that span Millvale, Shaler, and Reserve in order to preserve it as green space. Plus: What goes great with tea? Cookies. This week, we dug through our archives to find a previously unreleased clip. Very Local freelancer/cookie enthusiast Boaz Frankel recommends his favorite chocolate chip cookies around town.
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