The following is from our new Britannica, Wikipedia –

Tazo Tea Company is a tea manufacturer and distributor based in Portland, Oregon, known for their “New age” style marketing and product labeling. For example, every box of tea is labeled as “blessed by a certified tea shaman”.

Wow. Tea certified by a Tea Shaman which of course kinda means there are all sorts of beverage shaman’s out and about lurking near your nearest Starbucks, or Gloria Jeans, or The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, or that cool T2 tea chest emporium place that I’ve always been fascinated with.

How cool. It gets me to wondering what the Sunkist orange soda/softdrink shaman would be like. Would he be dressed all in bright orange and a really large half cut super-orange as a hat… he’d probably speak in a Polish accent… don’t know exactly why but he would just look like the sort… with his big orange eating goofy grin and off-centered ears. I reckon he’d be pretty tired of being confused with those entertaining cultic jesters ‘The Orange People’ from the 1980′s or worst still, getting all messed up with the troubled Northern Ireland parades in the 1970′s. The fact that he appears to be blowing small spit bubbles when he speaks doesn’t help… and the orange stained teeth. And the oddly placed Swatch Watch set for Eastern Standard.

It kinda gives a new bent to that Southern states fav’ Dr Pepper. Perhaps he really was. It all starts to become much more clearer now – I’m gonna have to research these beverage shamans more so I can conscript them into service for the forthcoming ‘Goatary’ forums. My beverage shamans will subversively populated all threads and rattle on to each other about shaman-like stuff and the world of hot and cold beverages. The big concern will be how well the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola shamans behaviour -last thing we need is a Jeffroe (feel the power of the spelling freestyling take over your fingers young Pappadam) and Clampette thing happening like in Nevada.

Oh before I sign off – being a self-confessed branding nut, I also liked that the Wikipedia entry www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazo felt the need to also note that the logo above was set in Exocet typeface. Cooool. We got mad beverage shamans running about the place certifying stuff and it’s in a typeface that conjures up images of Nuk’missiles taking off from battleships and underwater subs. Now that’s Tazo dude no doubt.

…of course I thought Tazo was those little plastic coated playing discs with Japanese comic heros on them that you found in the bottom of potato chip bags… Things change but people don’t bother to relabel. So slap-happy.