Most Popular 18th Century Tea

John Townsend's live stream, and hey, we're doing tea today. A lot of people have asked about tea in the past, so we're going to be talking about tea. I'm John Townsend. Behind the console with the computer and the audio stuff is Aaron. He does all the editing, and he kind of makes these live streams happen. And Kyle is the magic man behind the questions console. So you've got to be nice to Kyle. Give him good questions when the time comes, because that's a hard job. Curating and then reading them out, especially if you try to read all those screen names, that is not easy. So thank you, Kyle. Today, we're going to be doing tea. Just a couple of things right off the top, though, kind of housekeeping stuff. We do have super chat running. So if you love our videos and you want to help support what we do, help us make more videos, especially like that Bill Maddox one that we turned out on Thursday. Super chat is a way you can help us do that, and it also kind of pushes your questions up in the stream, too. So we also have probably a better way to help support us would be Patreon. For those folks that are able to support us kind of monthly with a small amount of money, Patreon is a great way to do that. There's also a PayPal link that's probably the best overall, but there's a PayPal link and hey, you can go to our web store where we sell all kinds of cool 18th and 19th century reproductions like stuff I'm wearing and cups and all kinds of good stuff. Also, we have merch. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Let's get to the topic at hand. Before I start doing the topic, though, you can kind of hold your questions until we get a little bit further into this, because if you give them right now, then they kind of get lost in the stream. So hold on to your questions. Some have fun in the comment section of tea. Teas like a massive, huge topic for the 18th century, 17th century, 18th century and for England and the Dutch and North America. It's just this giant topic. And of course, I won't be able to cover it completely because, I mean, you can write a book like that thick on tea for 18th century stuff and not cover all the bases. But we'll have fun. There's some great stuff about tea. But before I start talking about tea, I'm going to make this tea because my water's hot now and if I wait, it'll be cold and we want to use hot water for our tea. I got this. Today I'm going to be making bojia tea, which is the most common kind of tea that you will see in the 18th century. References to it show up basically everywhere. You'll see references quite often to something. You'll see bojia tea and green tea. Now, today we don't actually call it, we don't call it, we don't call it bojia. I believe I looked it up earlier today. I think it's wuyi is the typical name for this style of tea today. And it's probably similar to an oolong tea. Let's see, do I have enough in there? Oh yeah, there we go. Yeah, if you want to know the majority of the kind of tea that was dumped into the Boston Harbor, it would be this kind of tea. Okay, there we go. We'll let that steep. We'll see how that turns out. I haven't tried this particular tea. So, you know, we used to actually carry a lot of teas on our website. We don't carry them anymore because it was kind of difficult. But we do have, this stuff just smells really good. I went on Amazon, did some looking up for this particular style of tea and this colonial bojia showed up and I haven't tasted it yet. But it smells wonderful. If you're interested in this kind of tea, there's an Amazon link down in the description section. It's an affiliate link. If you purchase through that link, we do get a small commission. So that would be wonderful too if you're interested in this kind of tea. Man, tea is so cool. It's one of those things that gets started to get imported into Europe, into Great Britain, in the middle to late 17th century. You would have thought by as popular as tea is in the 18th century, that it would have been a much earlier import. But really, England doesn't start to get tea until the 1660s, 1670s at the very beginning. It starts to spread pretty rapidly. I think Scotland, the first tea kind of shows up in there in 1680 or so. It wasn't probably until, you know, possibly some tea comes to North America as early as 1680. But it doesn't really start getting popular until right there at the turn of the century, say, you know, 1700 or so. But at first, it was really a Dutch thing. They really had the trade kind of locked in. The English kind of pushed into the trade right there in the middle of the 17th century and really got a foothold in China and started bringing tea over. Apparently, the Dutch were trading tea. They were basically trading it one for one with sage. At least you find that in a lot of references in the 18th century. The Chinese were really interested in sage at the time. And so they would trade sage and tea kind of one for one. And so there was even one author that said, boy, you know, if the folks in China weren't that interested in sage, would we be drinking that much tea? Because it would have cost a lot of money and they wouldn't have been trading it. So there's this linking between that. Tea gets to be, of course, a monopoly with the East India Tea Company and all that kind of fun stuff. The interesting thing about, well, there's a ton of interesting stuff about tea. But one of the things I find interesting is that it starts to get really popular. People talk about its health benefits and like, oh, this is going to be so great. And then maybe 10, 20 years into it, they're thinking maybe tea is a bad thing. It's gotten too popular. And so you find some people saying tea, it's got all these wonderful effects, wonderful health effects for people. And then other people, oh, it's going to kill everyone and it's bad for them. So you actually start to see kind of a tea backlash happening within the health circles in the 1730s, 40s and 50s. And I've got some interesting, let me see if I can find it here, reading about that. Do I have the special ingredient? No, I don't have the special ingredient. He wanted me to doctor my tea. It's already going to be bad enough. I already feel kind of a little wired and I haven't even started drinking the tea yet. So we talked about Peter Calm before. And specifically in a North American context for tea, I thought this Peter Calm quote was really interesting. He doesn't talk about tea very much in this giant thick book about traveling in North America. But then he talks about tea here in this one section. He says, on such journeys as mine, and he was traveling in the back country of North America through a desert country where one cannot carry wine or liquors, where the water is generally unfit for use as being full of insects. In such cases, it's very pleasant when boiled and tea is drank with it. And then he says, through the desert forests of America on such journeys, tea is found to be almost as necessary as vittles. So he even though earlier on in that little quote, he says, well, some people have some people don't maybe think that tea is is good for you. Even coffee is necessarily good for you. He's like, boy, in this circumstance where you have to carry this, you know, carry things along with you and you want to make tea fit for drinking, then or water fit for drinking, then tea is a great way to do that. And the interesting connection that I have with that particularly is I grew up, I was never a tea drinker. My my sisters drank tea, Frances, especially who used to run the company here. She's a tea drinker, drinks lots of tea. I always thought I called it wood water. It's like horrible stuff. And it wasn't until I went on a trip to Africa and there was no good water to drink or it was filtered and it didn't taste very good that I got the habit of drinking tea for the very same reasons as Peter Calm did. So and since then, I've been a tea drinker since that trip. So that there you go. Hey, they're wondering if you're going to put nutmeg in your tea. We forgot. No, I'm not going to put nutmeg in my tea. The tea is going to be good enough without it. I know it sounds sacrilegious. I think there need to be a T-shirt made that says wood water plus nutmeg equals awesome. Oh, there's a gentleman called a doctor called Short. He wrote a whole treatise. It's on the floor and I can't reach it now. A whole treatise about tea. And it's it was really it's a really weird pamphlet. It's like probably like 100 pages. And he talks about tea and where it comes from and what the plants like. And he does all these scientific tests on tea, which seem kind of weird because I don't think they really result in much information. He talks about making tea. He says, oh, he's got some good things. And then he spends the whole last like third of the of the pamphlet talking about how bad tea is and how it's expensive and and regular people shouldn't drink it. And it's a really weird little pamphlet. But that information kind of disseminated it. It was it's an interesting pamphlet because the people who were for tea, they would use it as proof. So, yeah, tea is great for you. And then the people who didn't like tea, they use the pamphlet and said, look, see tea is bad for you. There was a section in. Yeah, I think he's done. People are saying it's been going on. No, see, that's why that's what happens when I get started. OK, I'll put that down. But there's this really good quote I got to read. Yeah, we'll go back to that tea. Oh, gosh, boy. Oh, boy. What happened? Nothing like it's going to be great. Looks really strong. OK, so tea, they did many of the references in the 18th century. They were putting the English and North Americans were putting sugar in their tea. They were putting somewhere. I've got some milk. There it is. They were putting milk in their tea. The doctors even talk about, you know, how a little bit of milk in your tea is going to be a good thing. Obviously, the folks in the Orient weren't interested or didn't typically take it that way. But the folks in England did. Obviously, you can see my tea strainer only did. Are you going to tickle them? My tea strainer only did such a good look. Oh, yeah. Here we go. Yeah. So I got some floaty tea leaves. It's good for you. Let me tell you, this stuff smells so good. It hasn't been just a couple of months ago that I started really drinking oolong most of the time. And this has a just this particular version. Wonderful, smoky flavor. There is smell to it. You open up that canister and you just want to eat it right out of it. I see you chewing on the. Yeah, got juice here. Nice, thick tea. So this has got definitely a little bit different flavor than my typical because I haven't tried this one before. The scent is, again, heavenly. Oh, Aaron wants to try it out. And there you go. I'll give you guys a try. I don't get to drink it. Well, I'll try some. I smelled it yesterday and it almost smelled like tobacco. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Yes, I want it back. They're stealing my tea. Yeah, yeah. Very, very nice tea. That's some good wood water. So let me see if I can find this reference. Yeah, great wood water, John. 1744, the Scots Magazine has references. And apparently a lot of folks in Scotland, I don't know if it was almost like a political thing, having a thing against tea. Maybe it was because it was English. Maybe it was because, you know, the aristocracy was drinking it. But I've got these two little pieces here. For some years, the use of tea had been creeping in amongst nearly all ranks of people. To be, in many respects, an improper diet, expensive, wasteful of time, calculated to render the population weakly and effeminate. Towns, parishes, and counties passed resolutions condemnatory of the Chinese leaf and pointing strongly to the manlier attractions of beer. So tea and coffee, chocolate to some extent, came into the diet, especially of England, and it replaced, especially for breakfast and all kind of manners of meals, it replaced beer and ale. And so you have these guys saying, now, wait a minute, beer, we need to go back to this better drink. We need to get rid of this sickly, weakly tea stuff and drink good, strong ale. Again, this is part of that same Scotts Magazine, 1744. We, being all farmers by profession, think it needless to restrain ourselves formally from indulging in that foreign and consumptive luxury called tea. For when we consider the slender constitutions of many of the higher rank among whom it is used, we conclude that it would be but an improper diet to qualify us for the more robust and manly parts of our business. And therefore, we shall only give our testimony against it and leave the enjoyment of it altogether to those who can afford to be weak, indolent, and useless. So obviously, the Scots were thinking, give us our strong beer and ale and take away the tea that makes us weak, indolent, and useless. No rhetoric there. Yes, and I like the part, especially those with slender constitutions, not merely burly, manly men. Oh, gosh, I have so much. There was this great little pamphlet called On the Use of Tobacco, Tea, Coffee, and Chocolate and Drams. And it was a little pamphlet that basically they gave away at tobacco shops that told people how to use tobacco. And apparently, they probably sold tea and coffee as well because it gives instructions on tea and coffee. And it's got a really nice and interesting page with directions about how to fix your tea in the 18th century. Don't drink it too hot. That might be bad for you. About three or four little cups of it are fitting enough. So don't drink too many. Although there was one interesting reference where somebody was testing to see just how bad tea was. And so they said, oh, you can drink 100 or 200 cups of it without it damaging you severely. So they were willing to go to the bat with tea. Let's see. But at the end of this little tea section, we kind of circle back to that same thing. At the end of this little tea page with instructions, it says, but to speak the truth, never was a better state of health enjoyed than by our ancestors when the toast and good beer went around for breakfast in the morning before ever tea, coffee, or other new inventions came up. So even though they were selling tea, they still thought, you know, beer and toast, probably a better breakfast than tea or coffee. There's so much more. There's like a whole topic about tea and tea cups and the equipment that come with tea. But again, I don't have, I don't have hours and I would bore you to death with all these really cool little things about tea. I'm ready to take a few questions before. Yes. Merch thing I was talking about. Oh, where did it go? Oh, here it is. I got my tea in it. The nutmeg mugs are available again. We were out for a little bit. We do have the nutmeg mugs available. Nutmeg. It's a verb in the 18th century to flavor literally anything to 100%. John found the drink to be lacking in flavor, so he decided to nutmeg it heavily. Except, of course, the tea, which I didn't. And it's got the little Townsville logo on the backside. If you're interested in a mug, they're on the website. There's a link in the description section of the video. Also, we're working on some books. Oh, I wish I had it available for you today. Here is a copy. Can you show this on the thing? Yeah, lower it a little bit more. Yeah, just lay it. There you go. How about that? Yeah, lift it up actually a little bit. A little more towards the camera. Yeah, right there. Down a little bit. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Is that perfect? Yep. It's a book we've been working on publishing a couple of books. They really are just period books in a printed format. Many of these, almost all these books, you can find online for free as PDF versions. And I enjoy researching that way. But when it really comes to understanding the material, I got to have it on paper. I got to have it on paper. We've been bundling up some of these books into printed forms for folks. This particular bundle is The Domestic Coffee Man, showing the true way of preparing and making chocolate, coffee, and tea. And it's got instructions for making your own chocolate and how to do tea and coffee. And we also bundled it with The New Art of Brewing. So it's like two books from the 1740s about drinks, tea. This is not available right this second, but it will be in a day or two. So look out for that next time. Next time, I'll have a link for you and you can check this particular book out. In Monday's video, I think we're going to put one of those books in the... Yeah, in Monday's video, we'll be doing a recipe out of Hannah Glass's cookbook, The Art of Cookery. And that's another one of these on the list of books that we're doing here. Hannah Glass's cookbook. It is really just one of the go-to's. That's another one that's available online with a sort of Townsend's imprint of 18th century books. So in a modern, you know, format, because it can be very hard to publish these really thick books in a period binding method. It can get pretty expensive. So in a modern binding method. Okay, now I'm ready. What do we have, Kyle? Well, we got a couple. Let's see. Cruel Hearted wants to know, what is beaten cinnamon? And she is on page 58 of Primitive Cookery. Okay, I don't have Primitive Cookery in front of me, but beaten cinnamon. Well, cinnamon at the time came in, obviously, sticks like you can buy it today. It depends. I mean, I don't have the recipe to read to try to get some of the context for it. I mean, most of the time we buy cinnamon in the ground form. And it's beyond ground. It's pulverized into this very, very fine powder. It could be some of the 18th century recipes. You just kind of chuck the stick into, say, milk and you boil it up. And then you take the stick out. So you're just kind of getting an essence of cinnamon. And then other times they call for a ground version to be put into the recipe. I'm guessing beaten cinnamon. That's what they mean. Ground cinnamon. It goes into the dish and stays in there instead of being sort of infused in it like a tea would be, where you would actually take it out. Cam Drapery wants to know, what is the traditional way of brewing tea in the 18th century? In the English context, they did it just like I did it here. They would pour basically boiling water over the tea leaves, let it infuse for a period of time, and then take it out. They might just leave it in the pot also. There are several different kinds of suggestions about making tea in here. Some of them, one of the interesting ones, I think it was even in Short, who is one of those tea's good, tea's bad kind of guy. He talks about making tea in the pot and only filling it up kind of halfway. And then, you know, serving the tea out before it gets all the way depleted, pouring more water in so that you don't, you aren't just like getting the second, the full second run of the tea leaves. You would still have some of the old tea left over and so it would still be good. It would, you know, you wouldn't get this sort of, oh, second round tea, this isn't very good kind of situation. But it seemed like they had a, there was a good deal of variation in how they took tea in England. And one of the topics I didn't even get to was that tea was so very expensive that many times it was adulterated. And one of the adulterants for tea would be selling used leaves as fresh leaves. And people were stealing tea all the time, like servants would steal tea from the household and take it home. Next question. It actually almost answers another question from Pixie K. She says, would they reuse their tea leaves in another cup? Yeah, a person might. Obviously, as they, again, if it's really expensive, they're going to figure out how to draw that out. Now, that kind of goes to the idea that if tea is expensive, was it drank by basically all parts of the population? And it turns out that because of its so-called, and, you know, possibly quite true health benefits, that even poorer folks were drinking tea. So even if you couldn't buy a lot of tea, you still were interested in tea. Everyone wanted to drink tea. Everyone. Everyone wanted to drink tea. So even folks that were poor were drinking tea. They probably didn't have as good a tea. They talked about adulterants. It's like whole forests of trees are being cut down and ground up into sawdust to be used in fake tea. So they would have like, you know, two real tea leaves and the rest is sawdust. Talk about wood water. Anyway. I'm going to probably butcher this name. Nevermind. I'm not even going to try. Is it true that the harbor smelled like tea for days after the Boston Tea Party? Yeah. Supposedly it was very, very like that. I mean, you can go to, there's a Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum. They've got this great historic site that you can check out in Boston. And that's all they do. They do tea party and that's it. And they talk about tea and they've got ships that you can go on. You can even throw some of your own tea overboard or their tea overboard. Check out that historic site. There are great folks there at that site. I hope sometime to be able to go there and visit that site. I haven't been there personally, but they have a lot of interesting research on their website and some of it talked about some definitely period references to the harbor smelling like tea. There was a lot of concern about people, you know, retrieving the tea, salvaging the tea. And they actually went out in boats for days afterwards with oars and smashed the boxes and tried to make sure everything sank. So yeah, very, very interesting thing about the Boston Tea Party. Yeah. A quick shout out to Dynamite Stick. Thank you for complimenting me on my manly voice. Was the tea that was put into the harbor in block form or loose? As far as I know, there is no good documentation for brick tea in the 18th century in Europe or North America. It seems like everything that came over to us was a typical loose form of tea, not the stuff that was compressed into bricks. I don't think that shows up in North America until the 19th century, probably middle end of the 19th century. Kay Dixie wonders, when did tea bags come along? When did they start putting them in the bags? I don't know. I haven't looked into any of the more modern stuff. I sort of stopped doing my research when I get to 1800, 1820 and stopped looking into tea. And so I don't know about other kind of strainer methods. In fact, you don't even really see strainer stuff talked about in these in the 18th century texts that I was looking up. So it could be that they just let the tea leaves sink to the bottom and kept on working with the pots. Let's see, Doc Coffee wants to know, what would you pair, what food would you pair with tea back in the 18th century? I could not tell you about that one specifically. There are a lot of mentions about this particular bojia being so sort of full and nutrient full. I don't even know what the word is I want to use, but that it was good enough that it served as a meal by itself. That if you were eating other things, that green tea was more typical. But this was if you were trying to replace a meal, this was the kind of tea that you would be drinking more likely. But what you would connect it with food wise, I don't have a good one. I mean, they talk about it all the time in connection with breakfast. And most of the time, these breakfasts, they're talking about toast, buttered toast specifically. In fact, the one guy was like, yeah, imagine if we got rid of tea, then people would stop eating buttered toast and we could save all this money on butter. I didn't make any sense to me, but I think he was grasping at straws because he didn't like tea. See, Jordan B wants to know what were other popular hot beverages before tea and coffee? I don't think they did have hot beverages before tea and coffee that I have any references for. I mean, coffee, tea and chocolate show up all the time in these texts. But coffee and tea, you know, coffee is probably predates tea a little bit, but not to any great extent. Chocolate shows up really about the same kind of time. So they're a trio that, I mean, even the one book is like, it's a treatise on, you know, chocolate and tea and coffee. Before that, I think most of the time it was a cold or just a room temperature beer ale small beer as a typical beverage for breakfast. And that stayed for some people into the 18th century drinking small beer for breakfast. Again, a typical drink for breakfast. Hey, John, what was the website you were talking about with the Boston Tea? Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum. I'll try to find it. Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum. I'll get that in the chat for you. And some other teas do show up in the, it's in my pile of paper, do definitely show up in the texts for middle of the 18th century. Now, you know, the bohias are the ones that show up the most, but you'll also find references to, and again, the names kind of change. I mean, today we don't call them the same thing. Bing Tea or Imperial Tea. Hai Song or Sun Tea. Xingluo, Sushen, Congo Tea, Pico Tea. A bunch of these teas are showing up in different kinds of texts. I even have a reference here for, I mean, you might want to think, it's like, when does this show up in North America? When does it get popular? I've got a book here of advertisements in New England newspapers from 1704 to 1775. And here's someone in 1710 in Boston. They're advertising that they're selling tea. Here's a 1716 reference to bohia tea and coffee at the same time. And later on, there's a reference here, 1729, 1730, Boston. They're selling tea at 45 shillings a pound. That's expensive. Let's see, Greg Wade wants to know, when did they switch from drinking out of a tea saucer to using a cup or a bowl? So it seems like the references, especially for the drinking equipment to come in, along with the tea, apparently whoever was selling the tea thought, you know, whatever vessels that people would use for tea, that's not going to work. Possibly they were told that probably by the folks that were selling them the tea, right? So it's like, oh, we're going to sell you this tea. And it's like, but you can't just drink it out of anything. You got to drink it out of a proper vessel. And at the time, the folks in China were drinking, and they probably still do, out of special little tea bowls, little handle-less small cups. And boy, if you go and search online, something like go to the British Museum, and you can do an advanced search on their website and look at a very compressed time period and look at some of the tea bowls from the 17th and 18th century. And they are just amazing. I love doing those searches and looking at the varieties. So they were drinking the tea out of these little tea bowls that came over with the tea. And apparently early on, they didn't even have saucers. Then saucers kind of come in, and there's this whole evolution of the coffee cup, right? That sort of, you can imagine beer and ale guys, they got these big tankards and giant handles, and they can hold two quarts in them. And then in come these little tea cups, light and delicate and small. So there has to be some sort of, what happens when these two things meet? And you end up with the porcelain tea cup, coffee cup, that you see sort of evolve and come into being. It wasn't there before. So it's interesting. You still see these tea bowls showing up all the way into the later 18th century. Some of them with these beautiful designs. They were emulating these things within the European culture. They were making them also in England and on the continent and probably in North America. But again, the whole tea equipment thing, the tea caddies, the tea pots, studying that is in and of itself really exciting. Renee 12 string wants to know, would you please discuss any medicinal teas that they used? You know, the topic here is probably herbal teas, right? So what we're talking about here so far is black teas, green teas, herbal teas were there. And in fact, there's going to be, if you go down into the description section, you'll find, excuse me, drank too much tea. You'll find a link to an herbal tea video that we did several years ago. I was just flipping through one of the cookbooks and there's this whole page section on medicinal herbal teas or a particular medicinal herbal tea. We made that out of specific herbs and you can check out that episode and that'll give you all the information on that. There's definitely references to that sort of thing happening within 18th century. And basically, if you go in the medical cookbook or medical books of the time period, they had, you know, all these different herbs and different plants that they were using for medicine. And they had, I don't know, 10 different ways of delivering this medicine. And one of those was infusions. Just, it's a tea, right? So whether they called it a tea, which of course they didn't early on because they didn't have tea, they were doing infusions just like tea for medicinal purposes, 17th, 16th century, 17th century, 18th century. They just might not have called them a tea. John, a lot of people are asking, when did they start reading tea leaves? Oh, no clue. No clue. I don't have a good guess for you on that. What is that made out of? The infuser. Yeah. This guy? Yeah. It's a little, it's grippy. It's a bamboo, a little basket strainer. We used to have them on the website and I don't sell them anymore. But if you really want them, we'll get them again for you. Aquastar wants to know what the next historical site you're planning to visit. We're talking, we've gotten a lot. In fact, in the last like 10 days, I've probably had three or four different historic sites kind of open up channels, talk to us about coming and doing episodes. The problem is, is they're very, it's very expensive to travel away, go to a historic site and shoot a couple episodes. Basically, it takes a week out of, a week for two of us to go out to a historic site and shoot a series of videos. So we have to figure out how that works. I'm just so interested in, you know, going out to more historic sites. I have to do it, but I also have to figure out how that works from the monetary end, I guess. So I don't have one scheduled. Real quick, obsession of the month keeps, I keep sending him the information, but I don't think they are getting it. What camera equipment do we use? We're using the Panasonic GH5 and the GH4s. Those are the cameras that we use. Yeah, there's a link to the camera recommendation page. I don't know if you can find that, Aaron. There's a page on our website that has links to all the different kinds of equipment that we use. I don't have a, I kind of want to put a little review caption on all the kinds of equipment we use. There's a little bit of that information there. Again, those are Amazon links. It's a link on our website. If you're interested in the camera equipment, we use, all right, we've gone through five or six generations of equipment as we've done the channel over the years. And boy, I'm just so happy with the current stuff that we've been using and love to recommend it to folks. So I'm going to throw it in the chat real quick. Right. John, a couple of people were asking where you went in Africa. I went to visit folks that were in Tanzania. I went to help set up solar panels and a water tank and stuff like that. So it was a spot. We landed in Arusha. We, right up close to Kilimanjaro and we traveled through the, you know, the Serengeti and all the parks there and got to see giraffes fighting. That is so cool. Elephants and, you know, all that good stuff. Went through the Ngorongoro crater and we were in a spot that was sort of close to Lake Victoria and truly an adventure. And again, for people who were like, oh, I wish I could, you know, go visit the 18th century. Well, some places, there are pieces of the 18th century alive and well. Although they're disappearing, you know, as, and that's probably a good thing, right? As different countries get more progress. I don't know whether it's good or bad. I'm not even gonna say that. But there are places where the 18th century lives on in the different way people live. And I mean, there are good things and bad things about that. But going and experiencing something like that is truly amazing. A lot of people are also asking, are saying that they want to fund a trip and they want to know how they can help. I wasn't going to talk about this. What we are thinking about is we either need to work with the historic sites themselves and find ones that are capable of helping fund us to go there. And there are other situations where there's no way for that site to be able to do that. And we're looking at doing individual Kickstarter projects to help us go to individual sites. So we are looking at that really strongly. We expect to come out with something really specific at the beginning of February. We'll see, guys. It's up to you, part of you helping us do that. We are totally open to that and excited about offering that kind of possibility for you to help us with that because we can't do it by ourselves. There's just no way. I mean, wow, it's difficult. So we will see what we can do. I'm excited that you guys are excited about that because we want to do that. Well, back to some tea questions. Games Donovan wants to know were soldiers given tea as a ration? I don't know specifically. I would say that I think part of what happened and it really depends on the particular, okay, depends on the time. I mean, within the 18th century, the 19th century and the nationality and this specific unit and whether it's militia or whatever, there are many times when they got their ration and then they bought things off the side and there was no, it's like, oh, you want something else? Well, go over there and buy it. And so I'm sure at times that they went and bought tea for themselves. I don't know of specific instances in the 18th century where they were given tea as a ration. I'm sure that happens in the 19th century. In the 18th century, I do not know. There may have been times when they demanded tea, but then the officers probably thought, we need manly men, not those effeminate people. So somebody's making a noise back there. So maybe they didn't want them to drink tea and they forced them to drink beer and ale for breakfast instead. Kristen Johnson wants to know how was tea stored in the 18th century, crockery or glass? Tea boxes that it was shipped in, crates. And then you would find the tea caddies. And that's another one of those searches. If you want to look for 18th century tea caddies, those were ceramic vessels to hold your tea in, like a little, you know, bottle with a, you know, maybe a one inch and a half around top to it. Highly decorated, beautiful pieces of pottery. So that's probably how you would store it. Sometimes I think you'd see in 18th century European homes, they could store their tea in little cabinets many times with a lock on it because they didn't want people to steal it. But are we getting there? We're there. I wanted to show you one cool little thing. Got this in the mail today, yesterday. I'm thinking about making some, but I think about making a lot of things. Medical medicine comes in the 18th century. You'll see these in paintings and pictures all the time. Sometimes it having a little message, right? But it's a little medical vial or a little medicine vial, little glass bottle from the 18th century. They were usually tall and skinny and had a little neck here where you could put a cork in it and tie a string to say what the medicine was on it. Just picked this guy up. Really, I just... Those are fun to have. Anyway, I also have this little guy I came to. I wish I had the... I probably don't have it. There you go. Can you get in there? It's hard to get it. There you go. Can you get it? It's a little lead rooster toy. I'm always looking at kind of toys and things that show up in the 18th century. I thought this one was really, really interesting. I may make something like that in the future. The problem is, of course, items like this you can't sell to children anymore because, well, number one, they might choke on it or it's metal and it's hard to prove that it's safe. And so you can only sell them to adults. You know, it's a toy. You can only sell it to an adult. Yes, the young at heart. The young at heart. And if you buy it for yourself and it ends up being played with by a child, I didn't have anything to do with it. Thank you guys so much for all the stuff you do. Did I have one more thing? I had one more thing. Oh, Rick and Hillary, the music and the live event. We talked about pushing it back to February. I think we've scheduled it for February 17th. That's a Saturday. We'll have them here in the store. I'm not sure about the exact time, but you can block that out for your calendar and we'll have a particular exact time and we'll do our very best to live stream the event. And that will be a lot of fun. So hold open your calendar for Saturday, February 17th, either at home on your computer, you can watch the live stream or you could come to the store and see it yourself. And that will be a sort of a CD release party for their new CD that they've done where they've collected all this. They've done music from the Vickers collection. It's all pre 1770 tunes from the Northumberland area. This is going to be so good. So much fun, great CD. And so we'll talk about that more in the future. I want to thank you guys for supporting us in every way you do. You watch our videos. So important comment, the comments so supportive. I want to thank you for commenting. It is a pleasure for the most part. No, it is a pleasure to go down in the comment section. I enjoy the funny comments, the mean comments that come up over and over again. There was one, oh, hello, nutmeg daddy. She wants a t-shirt or a mug with that on it. We'll see. We'll see what we can do. You guys support us with, you know, you go on Patreon or you go to the website or you just share our videos with friends. And that is so important to sharing our videos. That's how people find us. That's how the channel grows. You make that happen. So I so want to thank you guys for everything you do. Thanks for the great questions today. I'm sure Kyle is thankful that you gave him great questions. So thank you so much. And thanks for watching.