Friday Knows Tea

  Before we get into this dreamy perky explosion of teen magical girl flavor, a word about synesTEAsia:      Synesthesia is a neurological cross-wiring of the senses that leads the individual to experience sound as color, numbers as personalities, words as flavors and so on. There are a lot of different forms of synesthesia, and it is not uncommon for synesthetes to experience multiple forms to varying degrees. Polysynesthetes such as myself make up 2-3% of the world's population.      My dominant form is called Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia (I literally taste words) and is the root of my blending work. While being a tea blender certainly requires skill and knowledge of ingredients, flavor and texture profiles and palate matching, it doesn't hurt to have an intimate relationship with flavors and the stories they evoke. I imagine a word, an idea, a lyric, a feeling or a memory, then pick apart what I taste in my brain-mouth using my decades of experie...