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\u201cIn joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends,\u201d wrote Kakuz\u014d Okakura in his 1906 essay \u201cThe Book of Tea.\u201d Okakura wrote the essay for a Western audience, articulating his philosophy of \u201cteaism\u201d to Americans whose infatuation with tea from China, Japan and India had been growing for hundreds of years. \u201cTeaism,\u201d Okakura wrote, is \u201cfounded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.\u201d<\/p>\n
If it is a sordid fact of the current cannabis industry that companies must self-promote at recurrent conferences in corporate hotel ballrooms, then Kikoko embodies teaism\u2019s ability to seep beauty into the mundanity of commercialism.<\/p>\n
I first encountered the cannabis tea company Kikoko<\/a> last October at a cannabis social event in San Francisco, where a friendly representative poured me a compostable cup filled with sweet, microdosed<\/a> hibiscus-flavored Sensual-Tea inside a small trailer decorated with flowers and midcentury modern furniture. Later that month, the Kikoko team appeared at the New West Summit<\/a> in Oakland, California, dressed in petticoats and ready to convince conference-goers to try on antique \u201ctea party\u201d costumes at their booth on the crowded exhibition floor.<\/p>\n \u201cWith this company, we\u2019re doing something more fun and not conforming to any set way of doing business, but trying to be the sort of company that gives back,\u201d said Chelsey McKrill.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n (Keeping with the tea company\u2019s playful attitude, McKrill holds the formal title of Kikoko\u2019s business development sorceress.) \u201cWe created our own little tea house at the New West Summit. It\u2019s really empowering and it\u2019s fun \u2013 it brings some kind of whimsy to the company.\u201d<\/p>\n Two women who have been friends for 20 years lead Kikoko\u2019s team, and spent three years creating their four tea blends, which each prove themselves to be delicious innovations upon an edibles tradition that stretches back far back into legend. The first \u201cknown\u201d medical application of cannabis came in tea form, at least according to the myth of Emperor Shen Neng<\/a> of China, the patron deity of Chinese Traditional Medicine, who \u2014 as the story goes \u2014 prescribed marijuana tea for ailments such as gout and rheumatism back in 2737 BCE. And historical texts prove that on the Indian subcontinent, people have been drinking bhang \u2014 tea made from a paste of ground cannabis and mixed with milk \u2014 since around 1000 BCE.<\/p>\n But unlike traditional cannabis teas, or the more-recently-popular concoctions brewed to eke out every last drop of THC<\/a> from leftover stems, Kikoko has the wonders of modern extraction science behind it. All of the tea\u2019s source flower is sun-grown on sustainable farms in Humboldt<\/a> and then extracted into a raw CO2 oil. The oil then goes through a proprietary drying process, turning it into a powder that is mixed with the tea\u2019s organic herbs. The result is a cannabis tea without an oily sheen, without steeping time limits and without any of that \u201cweedy flavor.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt took us working with three different science groups over three years to create this formulation,\u201d said McKrill, as we sipped cups of Sympa-Tea, Kikoko\u2019s 20 mg CBD\/3 mg THC tea brewed with warm ginger and turmeric. \u201cOur founders also looked at thousands of years of herbal medicine history and chose herbs that would target each of the four ailments we make teas to address, and then blended for taste.\u201d<\/p>\n Besides Sympa-Tea and Sensuali-Tea, Kikoko also offers Tranquili-Tea\u00a0\u2014 which combines 5 mg of the unusual cannabinoid CBN<\/a>, 3 mg of THC, chamomile and lemon myrtle to help for sleep\u00a0\u2014 and their most potent brew, Positivi-Tea, which has 10 mg of THC, 5 mg of CBD to take the edge off, some naturally occurring caffeine to heighten the high, and terpenes from\u00a0 lemongrass and mint.<\/p>\n There\u2019s still debate around the popular terpene science that inspires Kikoko\u2019s formulations and other cannabis products proselytizing the \u201centourage effect.\u201d A 2011 study<\/a> in the British Journal of Pharmacology<\/em> suggests that different terpenes can create different cannabis highs, but there\u2019s little else by way of definitive, peer-reviewed proof \u2014\u00a0yet.<\/p>\n And while the future might bring advanced terpene science, Kikoko is also hoping the next few years will witness their expansion into other markets around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cAs other countries slowly become more interested in cannabis\u00a0\u2014 like Australia, Canada, parts of South America, we\u2019re starting to think about expanding,\u201d says McKrill. \u201cBut we\u2019re definitely maniacally focused on California<\/a> right now, because this is our home base, and we figure if we can do well in California, we can do well anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n So while Kikoko\u2019s tea parties are now reserved for Californians already enjoying their fair share of free-spirited businesses and top-shelf cannabis products, the tea company might soon be spreading the philosophy of teaism for a wider audience. Okakura, it seems, might call Kikoko\u2019s plans \u201ca tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Originally published in Issue 30\u00a0of Cannabis Now.\u00a0<\/em>LEARN MORE<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0have you tried cannabis tea?<\/p>\n The post The Future of Cannabis Tea<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn joy or sadness flowers are our constant friends,\u201d wrote Kakuz\u014d Okakura in his 1906 essay \u201cThe Book of Tea.\u201d Okakura wrote the essay for a Western audience, articulating his philosophy of \u201cteaism\u201d to Americans whose infatuation with tea from China, Japan and India had been growing for hundreds ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":26079,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,111,85,4073,4209,4210],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26078"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26080,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26078\/revisions\/26080"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: The Future of Cannabis Tea<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"