Wayne County and The Shire

I first came across Mint Brook Meadow Tea at a stand run by an Amish couple at the Mill Race Center Farmers Market in Goshen, Ind. The pesticide-free, air-dried tea was branded as having been grown and packaged by Amish and Mennonite folks in Wayne County, Ohio. Several paragraphs on the box told me of the high place mint tea holds among Germans and their descendants. This tickled me since I learned to love mint tea from my grandmother, among other aspects of our Pennsylvania German heritage she shared with me.

I was impressed by Mint Brook Meadow Tea's good fortune when I found the tea again in early January in a Whole Foods grocery store in Pittsburgh. It seems the company is on the up and up: Tolkien Enterprises, which owns many of the merchandising rights for J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series, granted them the right to market Hobbit Tea.

Dante Tropea, one of Mint Brook Meadow's farmers, told The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer he appreciates the books' moral lessons of choosing to do what is right despite pressure to do otherwise, and that the tidy fences and farm fields of The Shire aren't so different from Amish settlements in Ohio.

Being a big fan of The Lord of the Rings as well as mint tea, I think I'll try the Hobbiton Meadow Mint first. — Celeste Kennel-Shank