During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mayra Betances searched for a sense of calm. She found it in blending spices, tea leaves, and dehydrated fruits to create teas drunk hot or as a cold-water infusion.
“I grew up drinking tea in the Dominican Republic. I started my tea journey because I was looking for a way to relax and meditate. Yoga wasn’t doing it for me,” she says.
At first, this was a mere personal journey, with no plans to evolve into a business. Then, “my kids told me I should sell [the tea products]. I started doing street markets and farmers markets in towns around Columbus,” says Betances.
Running a Restaurant
In June, she and partner Ernesto Villegas—in both life and business—opened Teas Your Spirits in Hilliard, Ohio. More than a tea shop, it’s a full restaurant and cocktail bar. Even more intriguing: the cocktails fold in tea. The business serves as a more permanent way for Betances to showcase all she’s learned and enjoyed about blending teas.
With 27 years of experience as a chef, Villegas developed food items as light as a watermelon salad or vegan caprese salad, plus heartier fare like a Hawaiian pizza. As a nod to Betances’ Dominican heritage, empanadas and a chimichurri burger (topped with chimichurri sauce, shredded cabbage, tomato, and onion) are also on the menu.
Every drink features tea in some way. Betances gives an example, “I make a passionfruit with English breakfast tea and add bourbon to it,” she says. “It can be hot or cold.” Another drink is the hibiscus margarita, with tequila, triple sec, hibiscus flowers, and lime salt or sugar.
It was important to also include mocktails on the menu as an alternative to spiked drinks (which also feature tea). One example is Blue Hawaiian, featuring butterfly pea flower tea, non-alcoholic Blue Curacao syrup, cream of coconut, pineapple juice, and club soda, with a maraschino cherry on top and a twist of lime. “It’s really refreshing, and it looks so pretty and is very flavorful,” says Betances. “That’s one of our most-sold mocktails.” She also makes butterfly pea flower lavender lemonade.
Many of the drinks can flex between a mocktail and a cocktail, such as one of her signature artisan tea blends (peach, apricot and black tea). To turn it into a cocktail, bourbon is added.
Educating About Tea
Educating others about tea is just as important to Betances as serving hot tea or cold tea infusion. Betances plans to teach a series of classes that are all about tea.
After all, what turned Betances onto tea wasn’t so much the drinking part but the processes behind the teas, such as finding spices and dehydrated fruits to build a blend, learning about the journey of tea, and discovering the differences in green and black teas.
“At the end of the day, I discovered that the ritual of making the tea got me relaxed, more than the actual drinking of the tea,” she says.
This awareness inspired her to launch a series of five workshops. They can be taken as a series or a la carte. Topics include:
- Tea infusions made from mixed dehydrated fruits with herbal tea and spices as well as cold brew
- The journey of the leaf
- How to make tea from flowers to create flower elixirs
- Where spices come from around the world
Selling Tea Too
In addition to running the restaurant, Betances sells her tea blends by the ounce for customers to enjoy at home—designed to brew with hot water or as a cold infusion. Another retail venture is the bottled tea infusions that contain all of the dry ingredients for a tea cocktail. When mixed with a spirit or liqueur and soaked, they are ready to drink.
Betances’ curiosity about tinkering with tea also resulted in her tea globes or “tea bombs." These are much like the hot-cocoa version, except they use tea leaves, flowers, and sugar, not chocolate. “I was one of the first ones to do that in Ohio, or at least in Columbus,” she says. “You pour hot water over them and watch them explode.”
Like all of her other passions for tea, she’s eager to share this with others in a workshop where participants can learn how to make tea globes, a trend she first noticed about three years ago.
“People are finding a new coolness to drinking tea,” she says, but “most people don’t know the difference between what is actual tea and what is herbal tea.” Her goal? To help demystify all things tea.
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