When Mim started the company, in 2006, Beaming with Health was all about tea…

As with many good things in life, Beaming with Health grew out of a moment of inspiration during a friendly cuppa. When Mim Beim, already a well-known practitioner and health writer, had her naturopathy practice in the Strand Arcade, Sydney, she would regularly leave for a quick daily tea break over at the Tea Centre, in the Glasshouse. In 2006, after many shared cuppas, her Tea Centre friends asked, ‘Why don’t you make us some herbal teas?’ It was only a second’s pause before Mim thought: Why don’t I? (She may’ve considered the notion over her favourite brew, Assam Dimakusi.)

How did she know it would work?

‘Because I would go into a health food shop and look at teas and think, “That’s not going to do anything, but it tastes nice,” or it would be therapeutic but taste horrible, Mim says. ‘A lot of herbalists just look at the therapeutics and say “this is good, that’s good, some of this” and throw it all together and it tastes like muck. But you can do both – therapeutic and taste.’

Since 2006 the range has expanded to offer the Soothe skin care range and two new gardening teas, with new herbal teas still to come in 2012. We now have several Stockists and sell our teas wholesale to several well-known restaurants. Talk to us about a blend for your business.

Want more? To show you who Beaming with Health is, and how it all works, here is the story of a tea – the new herbal tea in 2011: Regularity, formulated to ‘get things moving’.

How a tea happens

Mim and assistant tea blender, chef Katrina Endean, of Caterina, are gathered in the BWH kitchen in Kangaroo Valley on a cool September morning. Bent over the selection of herbs for the new Regularity tea, notebooks and feedback forms from BWH product tasters nearby, they are perhaps reminiscent of the women in history who have gathered over similar pots of medicinal herbs. More respected healers or midwives than Shakespeare’s witches, although they are cackling – well, laughing.

Suddenly, Mim and Katrina forget the joke (till later) and focus on the herbs laid out in front of them. ‘So,’ says Mim, ‘first we do some practice blends, and try to get them right…a bit more of this, a bit less of that. Then we send the blend out to tasters.
‘We put the call out for newsletter subscribers to try this tea, for constipation, and had a very good response.’

Katrina then chimes in. ‘Based on their feedback, we’re now re-blending.’

MB: So, licorice… And then we had a senna mix, we had a combination of the – so am I going to double it? Or quadruple it?
KE: Yes – and ‘Double,’ they both say at once – And were we using senna leaf?
MB: We were combining them.
KE: Oh, were we?
MB: Remember?

Both women laugh, crumbling the senna leaves and pods into the blend. ‘Both the senna leaf and the pod are therapeutic, and also the pods are just too big, so we wanted some of the leaf in there too,’ Mim explains.
‘So it mixes properly, so it blends nicely,’ Katrina adds.

Mim goes on to explain that both pods and seeds have a laxative effect, as does the cascara, another therapeutic ingredient, but that she wants to reduce the pain that such an action can cause. Feedback on the taste has been good but… ‘If you had a tea with just the therapeutics alone, you would be doubled over in pain. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen, so we’re going to increase the herbs that are called carminitive. They’re antispasmodics. So, that’s what we’re doing with dill.’

‘And the peppermint,’ says Katrina.

‘Yes, so senna and cascara for laxatives, licorice is a laxative and a sweetener; the rhubarb root is a laxative, and then the peppermint for taste but also for the pain – with fennel…so that’s what I want to ramp up. And our dill.’

The blending goes on in concentrated mumbling and measuring at this point, still with some gentle laughter (and a little teasing of each other) now and then. Katrina explains that before the first blend is even begun, each herb is tasted individually so that they can tell in testing which flavours are affecting the taste positively and which negatively, recording notes as they go (which explains the notebooks). They balance this against the strength of the actions of the therapeutic herbs.

‘We tried the dill and it’s quite sweet. It shouldn’t affect the tea badly.’ Mim says, shaking the rhubarb root onto the counter.

‘Sometimes,’ says Katrina, ‘the therapeutic herb is so offensive that we don’t put it in. If it’s too overpowering, we’ll use another one.’

They often disagree on tasting notes – ‘About 70 per cent of the time,’ says Mim – ‘60 per cent,’ says Katrina, and they laugh at themselves. Anyone can see it’s a good working relationship, even after the handful of years Katrina has been on board.

‘When we did Frisky Business that was one of those ones. Because we’d tasted the herbs individually beforehand, we knew which one was really ruining it.’

‘So when we tasted the dill, it’s not like fennel, it’s subtle,’ Katrina says and, responding to a look, agrees with Mim: ‘That’s probably enough.’

The tea is brewed and, when ready, the kitchen is quiet while they’re tasting.

MB: The bitter is always going to be there, because of the senna.
KE: It’s not that bitter though, is it?
MB: No… (Mim is savouring the sip she’s taken.)
KE: And there’s nothing overbearing as an aftertaste or flavouring

‘That was something we had to watch with the teas you can serve iced – Go-Go and Dinky Di,’ Mim explains. ‘We had to get a blend that wouldn’t get too strong over time.’

Then Katrina puts her cup down. ‘So, basically, that’s how it works. When we’re happy with that, we call it done.’

‘Or if we keep on having to blend and blend and blend, we give up for the day,’ says Mim.

‘Our taste buds get over it,’ adds Katrina.

‘But when we’re happy, that’s the end of the process…and it’s ready to go. Costing, labelling, and product photography and…done.’

You can buy Regularity here

Interview © Beaming with Health, 2011. Written by Selena Hanet-Hutchins for Beaming with Health