The tea that was not

One cold morning, while our region was shut down due to the advent of snow, I discovered I was out of my favorite vanilla chai that serves as my go-to fast cup of tea. It’s nothing fancy, even though it’s tasty, and I’ve shared a review of it before. This was my second disappointment of the day. The first had been that while we were promised nine to ten inches of snow, we only got five, which is a good snow here, but remarkably ordinary compared to the snows of my Illinois youth.

I have no concerns about driving my Mustang in the snow. I learned to drive in a Mustang, and after your first winter driving involves a 30-mile commute in a foot of snow with an inch of ice underneath it while in a rear-wheel-drive vehicle, a couple inches of good packing snow on a 30-degree day is nothing. But our house is on a hill, and I do know my car’s limits. The refreeze under the snow on our wind-chilled driveway meant if I left, I could go places just fine, but we would not be getting back up the hill and I would be forced to leave my baby exposed to the elements.

That wasn’t going to happen.

Fortunately, I soon recalled a box of tea my husband had brought home from work. He does that, sometimes; he’s told all his coworkers that I love tea, so whenever they have something new, a teabag or two tends to come home in my husband’s pockets for me to try.

Such was the case with this pretty little box of caramel chai from one Harrington Smythe Tea Company.

The package boasted being a part of a holiday tea selection, so I knew it had to be something someone got last winter. Tea keeps remarkably well, so I wasn’t concerned about the age, considering it was sealed well and the tea in its unremarkable sachets was still pleasantly fragrant. It boasted good flavor for a simple bagged tea, so I thought I would share a short review complimenting the balance of warm but mild chai spices with a savory caramel that dominates the aftertaste. I suppose I’ve still done that, but when I went to look up the company to link to this tea, a curious thing happened.

It doesn’t seem to exist.

I turned up one record for a Harrington Smythe company; it was a trademark for the name, filed in 2008 and expired in 2015. But that Harrington Smythe produced goods like lotions and beard conditioners, not tea, and I sincerely doubted this tea had been sitting around for ten years while it waited for someone to drink it. For one, the packaging aesthetic struck me as too modern. All the same, the absence of the company’s existence was puzzling. Tea companies come and go all the time–years back, I reviewed a handful of varieties from Persimmon Tree Tea, and they’ve been defunct for years. (Thank goodness I found a suitable replacement for their Earl Grey!) But the difference between Harrington Smythe and Persimmon Tree Tea is that the latter turns up when you search for it. A quick Google search shows plenty of footprint left behind by the company. Traces of the site that once was, photos of the simple but nice canisters the teas came in, reviews on websites much like mine.

For Harrington Smythe Tea Company, there was nothing.

So where did this come from? Where has the company gone? Is this the only box of their caramel chai in existence? Is the brand some ephemeral front for some other industry? The only clue was a small line on the back: Distributed by Life Plus Style.

That name turned up a company for gourmet foods. I thought I was getting somewhere. I found their website. And then every page was a placeholder, showing theoretical products in obviously Photoshopped images, largely unbranded, with shopping buttons that didn’t work. There was no storefront. No actual presence for the company. Nothing.

I was foiled.

I suppose this tea doesn’t exist.