When I was across the border I stopped at the Pembina State Museum. A small roadside museum featuring the history and people of the region.

Among the various relics that highlited the frontier days of years past was some items I at first mistook as woodcuttings. They were in actuality slabs of compressed Tea.

You see in the old days to encourage tea to last for long periods and make it easy to transport it was ground up and compressed into convenient-to-stack plates that looked like small decoritive ceiling tiles. One side might have some manner of image that would indicate the company while the other was grooved up like a chocolate bar so uniformly rectangular pieces could be broken off allowing the merchants to use like "change" in a transaction.

In the gift shop they had some of these slabs and pieces for sale and so, beign the curious sort, I bought a couple of the small pieces.

Last night I took one, unwrapped it and set about trying to grind off enough to make a pot. Fifteen minutes later and after some success with a cheese grater I had enough dust worthy of a descent brew.

I gotta admit that it was a decent brew. Granted I had nothing that could filter the Tea dust as it steeped but all in all it was pretty good.