Kristina Courage (BESTEA / Grit Life Fitness)
Meet Kristina Courage! She's the owner of two businesses BESTEA and Grit Life Fitness. In this conversation we chat about growing up in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, her path to fitness and personal training, lessons from working with real people, not just textbooks, how she changed her views on nutrition and nourishment, how that led to her making her own tea, and how the Watertown community has played a big role in the growth of BESTEA.
Released October 27th, 2026
(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)
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Find out more about BESTEA at the drinkbestea.com or Instagram
Find out more about Grit Life Fitness at GritLifeFitness.com
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Thanks to podcast promotional partner the Watertown Business Coalition, a nonprofit organization focused on connecting local businesses and strengthening our community. Find out more at watertownbusinesscoalition.com.
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This program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Transcript
Matt 0:02
Hi there. Welcome to the Little Local Conversations Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with Kristina Courage, Watertown resident and owner of two businesses, Grit Life Fitness and BESTEA. One quick thing before we jump into the conversation. I'm currently running the second annual little local holiday giveaway. Where if you sign up as a monthly supporter of the podcast, you'll get a gift card or other gift from a great local business. I've got guests from Actors' Shakespeare Project, Arsenal Yards' Buttermilk and Bourbon, Condesa, Medium Rare, and Tori Jiro. Got gifts from Branch Line, Coffee Plus 254, Caldwell's Miscellaneous Fancy Goods, Cass School of Floral Design, Eastern Clothing, Fastachi, Gore Place, Mosesian Center for the Arts, and Mount Auburn Cemetery is give away a couple Solstice tickets. Head over to Little Local Conversations.com slash Friend and get one of these great gifts.
Matt 1:01
All right, so let's jump into the conversation, getting to know Kristina.
Kristina 1:05
Well, my name is Kristina Courage, and I live in Watertown. I have a full-time personal training business, and I also have a new business called BESTEA, where I make organic, fresh, healthy iced tea. Yeah, I've been a longtime resident of Watertown and I like to get involved in the community.
Matt 1:27
Cool. All right, so now we're gonna go back in time. I always like to get the story of how we got to where we are. So where did you grow up? Where are you from? Are you from around here, farther away? You know, where'd you come from?
Kristina 1:37
Yeah, I'm originally from the North Shore. I was born in Ipswich, very close to Crane Beach. I know that's a well-known place.
Matt 1:45
Landmark for people.
Kristina 1:46
Yeah. And I was there until I was 10. And then our family moved to Pennsylvania. So I would say my formative years were in Pennsylvania, but technically it was 10 and 10, literally 10 years in Massachusetts, 10 years in Pennsylvania. Out in the country, we had Amish neighbors. We lived around a lot of farms. I had friends in school whose parents were farmers. My parents were not farmers, but we did live on a lot of land. So I grew up playing outside, exploring. It was cool. I appreciate it so much more now that I'm older. But back then I just thought that was, you know, normal, I guess. And then when I was 20, I moved back to the Boston area to pursue higher education. And I stayed around here.
Matt 2:34
Yeah. And what did you study in school?
Kristina 2:36
Originally, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I studied American Sign Language initially. I just thought that it was very unique, very niche. I saw it when I was in church, there was a church I went to over the summer where there was an interpreter, and I just thought it was cool, interesting, and a way to help people too. So I sought the social work aspect of it where you're contributing. So I pursued that for two years, and then I didn't want to be so niche with it because it is its own culture. It was fascinating to learn about. And I learned the basic stuff. But from there, I thought maybe I would do social work because it was similar but more general. Yeah. So I switched a couple of times and I ended up in exercise science, actually. And that was a good move. It just took me a long time to get there.
Matt 3:30
Where did the, what what was the impetus, you know, ASL, social work, exercise science? Like what was the inciting moment or?
Kristina 3:38
I think with the American Sign Language, basically by the end of my second year, I was just a little nervous that I would be pigeonholing myself into a very, very niche career and I wouldn't have so many other skills outside of that. So I felt like social work was, like I said, a more general option where I could kind of figure it out as I was going through the program. And at the time, I had met a woman who was a social worker and she talked it up a lot. From there, I did probably like a year or two of social work in college. And then what I observed was that there was just a lot of burnout in that field, even though you could definitely go private with it. I just saw from like the public agency side of it that it was kind of a grind. And I just didn't think that was the best thing for my health.
Matt 4:31
So then you decided to focus on your health.
Kristina 4:34
Yes. Yeah. And I had always been active while I was in school. I was working at a YMCA. I actually had returned to Ipswich 20 some years later. And I was working at the YMCA there. And I was a part-time swim coach. I was a lifeguard. So I had free gym membership. And I had just never been part of a gym before. I just thought gyms were weird growing up because just go outside and play and I did cross country and some sports and stuff like that. So I was just active. I was just an active kid. So when I got to that point where I was, I didn't really know again what I wanted to do. I knew I really enjoyed exercise and fitness. I just didn't know people made careers out of it. I literally just didn't know that there was a possibility of me making a career out of it. The only thing I thought of was, oh, I would have to be a professional athlete. I didn't really think I could pursue that because I didn't have any specialty. So when I was working at the YMCA, I saw people training other people. And I was like, what is this? And this was early 2000s. So I didn't really know how to get into that career. And exercise science wasn't such a well-known path back then. And actually, you don't need a degree to work in that field. So I was a little bit uncertain on how to start. Apparently, you get certified. You don't have a degree, you just get a certification. Any person you ask gave you a different answer on which certification to get. So that was a difficult path to figure out. They were all just book study certifications. To me, that made no sense. Because if I'm like gonna be working with somebody one-on-one physically, like there needs to be a practical application. I can read a book. I can read the textbook and understand the science behind it. I don't know, the courses made no sense to me. I don't want to just buy a textbook study for three months and then take it online and exam.
Matt 6:40
Needs to be some practicum. Yeah.
Kristina 6:41
Yeah. So I found an institute. An institute, it's not a certification course, but it's also not obviously a college course. It's kind of in the middle. And there's not a ton of institutes in the United States, but this was a personal training institute, and they had numerous locations throughout the United States. So it was a seven-month program. And so I signed up for it and took it, and it was practical. So I went into a classroom four days a week. The classroom happened to be at a gym. So we would use like the group X room for our coursework, and then we would actually do practical stuff in the gym. I loved it. I thought the course was great. Our instructor was amazing. He was a coach for track and field. And his specialty was jumping. So he had the science down. He was a great instructor. So it was just very engaging. Yeah, it worked out well. I really liked that. So after that, I didn't, I didn't really have any sort of confidence as a trainer, but I went to gyms and was looking for a place to work. And because I hadn't really grown up around gyms, I figured the city would be a good place where I could have an opportunity. So I ended up in Somerville after I got certified. My very first job was at Harvard University through their gym. And it was a contract job. So I wasn't actually employed by Harvard. I was employed by the company they contracted to run their gyms. So I started off as, yeah, just a part-time trainer. It was a whole different environment.
Matt 8:19
Training like professors and
Kristina 8:21
Students, faculty. Yeah. It was really fun. But I wanted to understand how it all worked. It took me a while to acclimate to it, but I loved it because in a lot of commercial gyms, when you get hired as a trainer, your job is also to sell the personal training packages. Nothing wrong with that. I mean, I believed in training, but here it was just referrals. People would just fill out a form. And then my manager would say, this person is looking for a trainer and it fits.
Matt 8:51
So makes it a lot easier. You can just focus on the work.
Kristina 8:54
Yeah. And I had two managers who are great mentors for me. So they kind of pushed me along in a good direction to like be more versatile. So I got certified for group exercise classes and would teach some classes, which is also a great way to get clients. That was kind of my thing for a while. And then I also worked at the front desk as like a side gig. So it helped me to learn how gyms function, how they're run.
Matt 9:26
So what did you learn about how a gym works?
Kristina 9:29
Well, it's all about that particular gym. Like every gym has their own culture. It's usually set by the management or like obviously the employees that are there. They're the ones that set the tone. So if you're in a management position, you have a lot of power to set a very good precedent for the people who come in to use your equipment and use your facility and use your services. So the people that you hire are the ones that are the face of the gym. If you have a good relationship with the people at the front desk, they're literally the hub of everything. They know, they have to know everything about everything. So becoming friendly with the front desk is to your advantage if you are an employee there, because they will actually refer people to your classes and then maybe for personal training as well. And the other thing is I learned that sometimes they make it seem like you are in competition with other trainers to get clients. And it's really never that way because every trainer is so different. Even just personalities are different. You might not mesh with a client because of just a personality thing. It might not have anything to do with how you train or anything like that. So there's plenty of pieces of pie for everybody. I never felt like I was competing or, you know, taking someone else's client. And I have heard that that can happen at other gyms where it's kind of like you're fighting for clients, or if the manager shows favor to somebody, then they might be sending them more clients. So, and then my clients, that's the other thing. My clients actually are the ones that taught me the most about training. Because, like I said, when you read a textbook and you look at anatomy and physiology, they're looking at best case scenarios and you know possible deviations.
Matt 11:18
Right, this guy with a bad hip, he can't squat like that picture shows. What do you do?
Kristina 11:23
Exactly.
Matt 11:24
Do you have some examples of some of those early stories of things you encountered and what it taught you?
Kristina 11:30
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I remember this one woman that I was training. She was young. She was a student. And the reason why I remembered her, she was already very accomplished. And one of the main questions that you ask a client as a personal trainer is what is your goal? Why are you here? Why do you want personal training? I felt like I was really having to pick her brain to figure out what her goal was. I don't think she really had a goal. I think it was kind of the first time, I think of Harvard as a school, it always had a lofty position in my head, you know, like these are the brightest of the bright. They've worked hard to be here, they're very accomplished. And yeah, this one client I had didn't really know what she wanted. And I just found that really odd because she was at Harvard. And I was like, obviously, you have to have .
Matt 12:25
Some motivation.
Kristina 12:25
Yeah. Right. But after I digged a little, what I discovered was she had a strong obligation to her family. And her family is what really , like her parents wanted her to be there. So she was actually a difficult client to train because she didn't really have a goal that I could help her with because she didn't know what her goals were. Because she was actually doing someone else's goal. And probably less for training than for life. But I was just like, oh, okay. These are just people too, just like me.
Matt 12:59
Right, right.
Kristina 13:00
Yeah. So having a goal is so helpful.
Matt 13:03
So, what did you do? Did you just throw different goal ideas at her and see what stuck? Or like how did you get there with her?
Kristina 13:09
Yeah, I think asking questions helped. And to be honest, most people just want to look good. I think for a long time, I might have been too proud to say that out loud, but I think that was something that taught me, oh, no, it's okay to say that. You want to look good. That's the reason I'm here. I want to look better. It doesn't have to be like, oh, I want to squat 300 pounds or I want to be able to run a 5K in three months. Those goals are great. Trainers love those goals because they're very, very specific. They're very time-bound. But most people come in and they want to be toned. I have no idea what toned means.
Matt 13:46
I want to look better than I do right now. Okay, great.
Kristina 13:50
And I'm very blessed. I'm very tall. I've actually been this height since seventh grade, 5'10. So I'm very tall and lean. So I used to have people come in and just say, I want your arms. And I'm like, well, you can never have my arms.
Matt 14:06
You're a different person.
Kristina 14:07
Yeah. It's interesting because I think people often treat a trainer kind of like a priest.
Matt 14:13
It's a lot to take on to you, though, sometimes, right?
Kristina 14:16
It's taught me so much. But one of the coolest things about my job, I've realized this, is that I get to see a window into people's life that I don't think anyone else gets to see. Definitely not their doctors. And I get to see their health, but in a more holistic way, like their attitude, their approach to life, how they take care of themselves, medical stuff too. But I get to see kind of the whole thing. And it's helped me so much with my own health and fitness. And it's also helped me train people and also not to do stuff that I shouldn't be doing with people, you know. Like I can't fix, if they're not going to do something that I recommend them to do, I'm not sweating over it. You know, like that's their decision. I can give my two cents as a professional, but if they don't take my recommendation, that's totally fine. Where it used to upset me, but they're adults, they make their own decisions.
Matt 15:19
And I'm sure the social work background helped out with some of this mentality too, right?
Kristina 15:23
Oh, yeah. It's probably more like social work than I would have thought. Yeah. Just because you get to know people, I mean, it's called personal training. So it's very personal. It's one of those fields, too, where you can blur the line sometimes between the professional and the personal. Because it is personal. People will share stuff with you that they they might not share with anybody else. And then there are definitely clients that I've become friends with as well. So then there's kind of the other side of it. Yeah, it's a very personal.
Matt 15:55
Yeah. So you wound you wound up tying all your stuff together. I mean, maybe not the ASL so much.
Kristina 16:00
I haven't used that so much.
Matt 16:01
I mean, you're using your hands in a different way, I guess. So where did your journey go after Harvard?
Kristina 16:07
I stayed there for a while, actually. And I worked at another gym in Harvard Square. Just through knowing different instructors and the managers that I knew, I would pick up a class at another gym. So I was teaching classes at multiple gyms, kind of to figure out which gym I would want to work at. The gym I ended up at more full-time was the Cambridge YMCA in Central Square. Very similar to the Harvard gig, where I started off as a substitute teacher for a cardio kickboxing class. And then eventually I got that class on my own because the instructor left. And then I got more classes on the schedule. Then I got hired as a part-time trainer and got some hours there. And then I got hired as a full-time trainer. I was there about eight years. That was a good community because it literally had every range of human being you could think of. And what I also like about fitness is that, especially at a community-based gym like the YMCA, is that when people come in, you don't know anything about them. You just see them in their workout clothes. You don't even see them in their regular clothes. So I couldn't judge them based on how they dressed, really. So I would just judge them based on how they worked out. So it's a different way to see people.
Matt 17:31
Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any success story of a client that you're most proud of of where you took them from point A to point B?
Kristina 17:39
Yes and no. I would say I do have some great success stories, but honestly, I can't take the credit because it's with a client who is committed and they do the work that sees the most success. So I had a client who was an older woman. She had just been diagnosed with osteoporosis or osteopenia, somewhere on that track. And one of the things I had learned in my studies was strength training because it pulls on the muscle fibers, the muscle fibers are attached through tendons to your bone, which pulls on the bone, and so over time, strength training actually strengthens your bone. So you can actually create osteoblast consistently with enough stimulus. So it has to be heavy enough, has to be hard enough. Over time, you can actually make your bones more dense and strong. And that's what happened. I had this woman who was diagnosed. And what we did was leg presses because it was a machine-based strength exercise, but it was very easy for her to use it, but she could push a lot of weight with it. She, I mean, she built up to pushing a lot, a lot of weight with it, which has the biggest impact. And, you know, obviously she did it in a safe way. It wasn't too much. So you always progress people. So I believe it was a year later. It does take time. It might have been a year and a half later, she reversed it completely medically. It was reversed. Her bone density improved and she no longer had osteopenia , osteoporosis. So that has always been a great testimony because it is a very common issue, especially for women, mostly because I don't think we're as intentional about maintaining our strength as we get older. You do have to be intentional about it. Otherwise, it will decline. So .
Matt 19:42
Yeah. No, that's a good one. Any other stories you want to share before we move on and maybe start to wrap in this stuff too?
Kristina 19:49
Yeah. I have so many.
Matt 19:51
Just saying, if there was any other one you want to share.
Kristina 19:53
I would say the two most recent things about what I do for a job is thinking about transitioning out of it. It was something I hadn't really thought about before. Because in my 30s, I wasn't like, oh, what is this going to look like in 10 years for me? Like teaching 10 classes a week where you're doing the workouts might not be a great long term. It actually might not be a good long-term schedule. Because you learn your body, you might be a person that actually needs more recovery time between workouts. And depending on how much stress you might be dealing with, that affects recovery time. How you eat affects recovery time. How you sleep affects recovery time. So if those things are getting minimized, then as a fitness professional, you can still have all those things not go great. And then you're still pushing yourself actively, then .
Matt 20:45
Right, you can't say to that class, hey, I gotta recover today. I can't teach this class. It's on the schedule.
Kristina 20:51
Yeah. So training is great because you don't necessarily do the workouts. Classes are still good, but I would meet older fitness professionals who would be teaching over 10 classes a week. And I was just like, how? Like, how are you doing that? And then I'd find out they have all these injuries. And I'm like, maybe I don't want that for my future. So yeah, I had definitely started thinking about the longevity of a career like this. So I did get more interested in all those other aspects like nutrition, sleep, stress reduction, just better self-care. Definitely as we get older, we typically move less. So I don't necessarily blame it on age, but more on how our life phases change over time. Mobility becomes much more important to train. I would say over 40. Sometimes it's different. I'm being very general.
Matt 21:49
Wherever your life phase happens, yeah.
Kristina 21:52
Mobility work is incredibly beneficial because you want to be able to move pain free in all ranges of motion. You want to be able to get up and down off the floor. Like these are just practical, functional things. So mobility is more important as you get older, too.
Matt 22:06
Shift from looking good to functionality.
Kristina 22:09
Absolutely. And you can have both. You can still have both.
Matt 22:11
There's overlap.
Kristina 22:13
Absolutely. Yeah. I just met way too many professionals who had injuries or weren't healthy. Obviously, you don't have to actually be healthy to be in this industry. The other aspect, too, was on the nutrition part of it. There are a lot of fitness professionals who have very disordered eating, and they're the ones giving the general public advice on eating too. So that's just something to think about.
Matt 22:40
Yeah. It's hard to sometimes separate out this person is highly trained in exercise, but then people just put this aura of expertise on them for anything health related.
Kristina 22:52
Or yeah, injuries.
Matt 22:53
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So where are you at and now in your journey? So you still you're just doing personal training?
Kristina 23:00
I do classes, but they're all on my terms now. So the way I teach classes is I schedule them because I have my own business and I get to make the schedule. So I don't burn myself out. So all the classes are different. It's basically cross-training. One day I might do a HIIT class, which is like getting your heart rate up really high, doing a lot of cardio. And then I'll do Balletone classes, the class I teach, where it's the fusion class, a mix between ballet, bar, Pilates. It's more dance-based, it's a little slower. It's great because it's barefoot. So you get to train barefoot. I do a core class, which looks a lot like yoga, Pilates, mat class, and then I'll do a boot camp class. So there, it's not like HIIT, HIIT, HIIT, HIIT, HIIT, crazy boot camp classes every day. Again, it's really about cross-training, making sure you're doing different things.
Matt 23:58
And where do you teach those classes?
Kristina 24:00
I teach online. I teach an outdoor boot camp class three days a week right now, which is separate from my online classes. Those I don't work out. I just yell at them. I just tell them what to do.
Matt 24:14
That's easy for you. Hard day for them, easy day for you. Yeah. Yeah.
Kristina 24:18
And so, and that's fun because that's outside. I do like being outside. And do you have a name for your business or is it just ? Yeah. My business is called Grit Life Fitness. It's been around for a while, I guess. Five years? Yeah, going on six years. It's mostly personal training or two to one. I do partner training too. You can have two people. And I also am certified as a nutrition coach. Not a registered dietitian, not licensed, but I have studied nutrition. And it really is more about like lifestyle coaching. I know that's a very general term, but you're just looking at habits and how to improve your eating habits or other habits that affect your eating habits or your nutrition.
Matt 25:02
So yeah, that takes us to, I'm staring at a bottle of tea here that has come from you. Yeah, tell us how this journey started out then, your tea journey.
Kristina 25:12
Yeah. So BESTEA is the fruition of, I would say, my nutrition journey plus help from my friends and the people around me. But the thing with nutrition is I've never been able to diet, could never stick to something for more than like a day. So I just ate how I ate. I never really tried to eat a certain way. I would say the general message I got as a woman growing up in America was move more, eat less, which isn't necessarily true as a personal trainer. I know that's not always true. So my relationship with food changed as I got into my career, because I learned a lot about nutrition being in the fitness industry and being a trainer. But food is fuel. Food is nourishment. Food is health. Food is longevity. Once that switched and I didn't look at food like as good or bad, like, oh, that's a bad food. Or a great example is when I was in college, I would eat pizza at night, and I could eat a lot of pizza. I would feel very guilty. And the next day, I would want to wake up, go to the gym early in the morning and run five miles to burn off that pizza. First of all, that's not how our bodies work at all. But that's also just a very unhealthy relationship with food because you're never going to out-exercise your food. You're never going to do it. Unless you work out all day.
Matt 26:43
What is it? Like it takes like you can eat enough food to make a pound of fat in like a single meal, but then it can take like what, two weeks of exercise to burn off that pound of fat or whatever. Whatever. Like it's not , yeah, the inputs are more important than the output.
Kristina 26:58
Yeah. So the quality of food to me started to matter a lot more. It actually started with beverages first. I basically stopped drinking soda when I was in college and I would opt for water. I might have had sports drinks still back then, which I don't do now because those are also just full of sugar, which I don't necessarily need.
Matt 27:21
You're not going on a hundred-mile bike ride.
Kristina 27:23
No, exactly. Definitely not. Yeah. So over time my nutrition has changed. And it really was small steps over time. I would say now, if you looked at the way I eat, I'm not too restrictive. I'm not a vegan. I'm not this or that. I just try to eat clean. Clean. Again, everything has its own label. It's not raw, but you're just trying to eat whole foods, foods that come from the ground, things that are less processed. If they are processed, you are maybe understanding how they're processed, or you're making, you're processing it yourself. I mean, peanut butter is processed, right? You have to crush and make peanut butter with the peanuts. Most everything is a processed food.
Matt 28:11
Cooking food is processing, right.
Kristina 28:13
Exactly. Exactly. But what I mean is like foods that come in a package that include ingredients that have nothing to do with your body's nourishment. So I would say the last couple of years, that's what I've been more looking at is what does my body need and what is the stuff it doesn't need? So there are a lot of things in our food, I'm being very general here, but in our packaged food that again has nothing to do with nourishing us, has nothing to do with our health, has nothing to do with anything except keeping that food on a shelf for three months. I don't think it was until I was going to farmers' markets, like the Watertown Farmers Market, Wilson's Farm, where I was actually seeing, you know, produce would bring it home, it would go bad. And at first I was like really upset
Matt 29:04
I just bought all this food.
Kristina 29:05
Right. This is not how food works. Food comes in a can and it lasts for six months in your pantry. I think once I started realizing, oh no, food is supposed to spoil. It is supposed to go bad. It has a life. That again was another shift in how I was looking at it and how I was looking at how I ate. Going back to the tea, one of the main intentions of my tea is that it does not contain any of those ingredients. It doesn't contain any preservative or additive or chemical that your body doesn't need. Now, the tea doesn't last as long. It will start to ferment after a certain amount of time. It does depend if you keep it refrigerated. It is supposed to be refrigerated and how many times you open it up. But roughly it will last about a week and it's delicious. But that is speaking more to how I perceive and look at what food should be. Now I think it's strange when food does not go bad.
Matt 30:10
So why tea? So why did you focus on tea?
Kristina 30:13
This is a great question. I love this. I love this. So because it's easy and it's a great way to get some benefits from now, now we're talking about herbs, I guess, versus like just regular food. But I got a book on herbs a couple of years ago. There's certain herbs that can help with different parts of your body, and there are certain herbs that help make your skin stronger or it helps it heal faster. And the way herbs work is they're just a benefit. It's like a little boost. It's not like a drug. You don't see overnight change, but just adding them into your regular life to me is the easiest, the best, the least intense way to get just more nourishment. But it's simple, so simple. And the other reason, well, there's more than one reason, but I would say the second reason tea is a great option is kind of going along with what I focus on in personal training. What you're doing outside the workout really matters. One of the biggest issues I see with my clients is the stress factor. So sipping a cup of tea or having a nice, cool, refreshing cup of iced tea, or making yourself a cup of hot tea, that whole process is de-stressing. De not distressing, but .
Matt 31:36
D-E, not D-I.
Kristina 31:36
Yeah. Relaxing.
Matt 31:37
There you go.
Kristina 31:38
Where it can give you a moment to pause. Oh, you actually have to wait a couple minutes to brew it if you're making hot tea. You might have to wait for it to cool down before you sip it. And just saying the word sip implies that you can't guzzle it.
Matt 31:54
Not chugging. You know, you don't chug your tea. Usually people don't chug their tea.
Kristina 31:58
Their hot tea. Yeah. You could probably chug the cold tea. It is pretty delicious.
Matt 32:02
Yes, in my college days, I chugged a lot of unhealthy Arizona green tea.
Kristina 32:06
The other thing I learned that's really cool about tea, which is a great benefit of tea, is that it goes through your entire digestive system. So anything healthful or herbal benefit from the tea gets absorbed through your whole digestive system, which is amazing.
Matt 32:22
How's that different from some other?
Kristina 32:23
Well, so when you're looking at herbs, you can apply them topically and you can also make tinctures, which there's different ways you can use herbs, but you can make them very, very concentrated and put them on your tongue and they get absorbed, but it doesn't go through your digestive system.
Matt 32:41
That's quicker.
Kristina 32:41
Yeah, it's absorbed differently and quicker and stuff like that. So yeah, there are different ways. So this is just a very gentle, easy way to get herbs in you.
Matt 32:52
So you settled on making cold tea in these glass bottles. How did the business side of it build up? So you were, I assume you were researching this and making this tea for yourself, but then how did it turn into I want to make a business out of this?
Kristina 33:04
Let's try to sell the tea. Honestly, there was a company called Honest Tea. This is the coolest story because I, for a short period, trained the mother of one of the people who started that company. So that was a very cool connection. I didn't make the connection until years later. I don't train her anymore. But Honest Tea, I like the whole premise. They're not as pure as my tea is, because I do believe they were sold commercially. They had a huge, I mean, they're a well-known label, Honest Tea. But I do like that whole idea of something that is presenting itself as it is and giving you what you think you're getting and not anything you don't want. And also the backstory to Honest Tea is I believe her son, who started, his name is Seth. He was a Harvard student, did track or did running. Can't remember if he did track or cross country. But he actually developed the idea for the tea from doing track, and he wanted something refreshing to drink that wasn't water. And he didn't like the sports drinks and all that stuff. So that origin story is very similar to this story in terms of the product itself is too good and I didn't see that product out there. Honest Tea doesn't exist anymore. It was sold to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola just .
Matt 34:33
Did its thing.
Kristina 34:34
Did its thing , no longer exist. Now, Seth actually is a great business person, and he started Just Ice Tea, which is justice, so that he could still work with the people he worked with before in terms of the tea. My tea is not tea. Herbs are not tea leaves. Tea leaves are tea leaves. My tea has no tea in it. And they are all caffeine-free right now.
Matt 35:03
What is an herbal tea technically supposed to be called?
Kristina 35:08
It's an infusion. An herbal infusion. It's called an herbal infusion. There might be another name. There's so much I still don't know about herbs and all the different ways you can make things and brew things. I'm still learning a lot. But I just did not see a product out there that had the quality I wanted. And I don't think I'm alone. Kind of the realization, yeah, food, real food does go bad. But on the other side, I also just want less chemicals in my body because, you know, we're still breathing the air. We still have plastic around us all the time. We're getting a lot of exposure to chemicals. And probably at this point in the world, there's probably more chemicals that have ever existed because we keep making stuff and things like that. Things break down. And so just trying to take better care of myself. And I do think there are a lot of people out there that are trying to do that and still want a great tasting product. Now people can certainly make this at home. I was making it at home, but there's also the convenience factor. And I love also the bottles. The glass bottles are beautiful. Great quality over plastic because they're not porous. They don't leach those micro plastics. So that was kind of what brought it to the marketplace.
Matt 36:37
Yeah. So, first of all, when did you start this tea business? How long has it been going now?
Kristina 36:42
I would say officially a little over a year. And this is where I have to give props to Watertown. It would not have happened the way it happened without not necessarily the farmer's market or the library, but what happened was I was teaching a class, a fitness class for Live Well Watertown. Watertown offers free workout classes throughout the year. I was able to teach a strength class, strength and balance at the library. Awesome. The last class I brought my tea in as just like last class celebration, try out my tea. Stephanie, who runs Live Well or is in charge of a lot of that stuff, I had given her samples as well of the tea, had her try it. So I had the idea I can start selling this. And I was like, well, maybe I can sell at the farmer's market. And I had already missed the deadline. I didn't know anything. But because of knowing Stephanie through Live Well, she runs the farmer's market. So she was able to help me. And so I got into the farmer's market last year, which was amazing. That was kind of where it debuted. That's where BESTEA debuted. We went twice a month. It was great for the exposure, getting it out in the community. Definitely got some repeat customers. And we did it again this year. This year, also, though, I didn't go as frequently because I am working on the wholesale side of it, seeing what can be done to extend the shelf life a little bit longer without adding any chemicals to it to make it more appealing for like specialty stores to sell it or cafes to sell it. It's a great complement to like a coffee shop because it has no caffeine, might be a good option for the afternoon. And a lot of coffee shops specialize in their coffees, not necessarily in their teas.
Matt 38:45
What is that like adding rosemary or I always see rosemary in everything as like a natural preservative, right?
Kristina 38:51
A lot of herbs are natural preservatives. Lemon. Lemon is a natural preservative. Salt.
Matt 38:59
I don't know if you want salty tea.
Kristina 38:59
No, I don't want salty tea.
Matt 39:00
I mean, that could be like a post-workout tea, right? Salty, salt tea.
Kristina 39:03
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Oh, the honey. The honey is also a big part of the BESTEA. I love honey. Honey was also in the herb book, even though I wouldn't consider honey an herb. But apparently, honey in its raw form is very health beneficial. So the sweetness of the tea is from raw local honey. It's not organic because there's no such thing as organic honey.
Matt 39:34
And you don't know where the bees are getting their flowers from.
Kristina 39:37
Wildflowers.
Matt 39:38
Yeah, but you haven't certified that wildflower as organic.
Kristina 39:41
Absolutely not. No, no, no, no. But raw would be the correct term. Raw means it hasn't been heated over 100 degrees. If raw honey goes over 100 degrees, the medicinal benefits diminish. But I use a local wildflower honey. The batches are small. I don't always get it perfect every time.
Matt 40:02
Where do you make them?
Kristina 40:03
Commercial kitchen. I have a permit for a commercial kitchen. It's a shared kitchen in Charlestown, Boston, called Foundation Kitchen. When I say this year I was only at the farmers market once a month, it was because I was working on that permit. For the farmers market, I was actually able to just rent some kitchen space from Maria's Catering. So I really feel like BESTEA is organically grown, the origin of being Watertown and then hopefully expanding out. But I would say the biggest impact for the tea to grow has been community, has been other people who enjoy the tea. It's definitely not just me. Oh, I can tell a story. Can I talk about honey some more?
Matt 40:53
Sure. Sidenote, is that specialty honey store still in Harvard Square that used to be there?
Kristina 41:00
No, no, I don't think so.
Matt 41:01
I remember coming across that whatever, like 15 years ago. Whoa, this is cool.
Kristina 41:05
I know. It was very cool. I totally remember it too. I remember looking it up. Maybe, no, maybe it does still exist, but it was only open like three hours a day or something.
Matt 41:15
Yeah, you had to go down the stairs to find it. Yeah. It was a little find.
Kristina 41:20
Yeah. So I have a, I think it's a fun story. I don't know if it's a funny story about acquiring the honey that I needed for the tea because I'm not just making, even though I make it in small batches, I need a good amount of honey. So where do you get honey in bulk? Because there are a lot of places that do have honey, but you're buying good quality honey in like an eight-ounce jar for 15 bucks or something like that. So I'm like, where am I gonna get this honey? So I had to really look around. I asked a lot of local places, but they don't produce enough to offer me a bulk amount of honey. So there is a apiary in Bill erica. It's a family-owned business. They also have locations in New York and then I think one other state, more in the Midwest, but they do have Massachusetts local honey, and it's only 30 minutes away, Billerica. They have a warehouse. When you walk in, it's like shelves and shelves and shelves up to the ceiling of five-gallon containers of honey. So like the Home Depot containers. I love buying the honey because I love the fact that I am buying a five-gallon container of raw honey, which weighs 60 pounds.
Matt 42:39
Yeah, I was gonna say you get your workout in while you're doing that, right?
Kristina 42:42
Yeah, 60 pounds.
Matt 42:43
But it's just a normal jar, not a bear-shaped.
Kristina 42:46
It's not bear-shaped, no.
Matt 42:48
That's the standard for some reason.
Kristina 42:50
And I learned though, that they will heat it up to like 99 degrees for you, and it makes it super, super pourable and super smooth to mix, which is amazing. Because otherwise it can get crystallized very hard and chunky. But honey does not go bad and it's antibacterial, antimicrobial. They can put it on a wound and it helps with that. So yeah, a lot of great benefits of honey. But that was a great find, I guess. It was the first time I bought five gallons of honey. It was amazing.
Matt 43:25
Well, why don't you give like a quick rundown of the different teas you have before we have wrap?
Kristina 43:31
Oh, absolutely. Yes, yeah. And everyone asked me what my favorite one is. And I don't have a favorite. So the first one is the Healthy Hair, which is the first one I started with. I'm in my mid 40s, and probably like a lot of other people in their mid 40s, I don't know how common it is. I felt like my hair was getting a little thinner. So I wanted naturally something that might help just a little bit. I wasn't obsessed about it, but anything that would help. So I read up on it for the herbs, rosemary, number one. It was like one of the top ones for hair, sage and an herb called horsetail. And if you think of like hay or horses, they have very thick, coarse hair. So I'm like, oh, okay, that kind of makes sense. It's not actual horse tail. It's an herb called horse tail. But those three herbs, good for your skin, your nail, and your hair. And then I sweeten with honey. It actually is very refreshing. I never would have thought rosemary would be a good flavor for iced tea, because you normally would maybe put it on your meat.
Matt 44:39
Savory.
Kristina 44:40
Yes, exactly. Yeah, you wouldn't necessarily think of a sweet tea for rosemary, but it's delicious. That one is the first one that I actually made. Then I have a one called MINTEA Fresh, which is peppermint and ginger. Those herbs are both good for digestion. They're good for other things too. What I've found is just like personal training, exercise is good for everybody. Herbs are good for everybody, but not everybody is gonna have the same response. For some people, peppermint bothers their digestive system. They don't like it. It's not good. So it's not one size fits all. It's just in general, peppermint and ginger are good for your digestion. And that one's very good. That's a popular one because it's a well-known flavoring.
Matt 45:26
Right. They might be like horsetail. What's that? Peppermint, I know that.
Kristina 45:28
Exactly. Yeah. And then I have two more. I have one called Nighty Night, which is chamomile and clove, which is a very unique pairing because clove is very strong. Chamomile is very mild but sweet. That helps with sleep. So that's called Nighty Night for relaxing. Chamomile is a natural relaxant. It will actually help your muscles relax. That's why it's helpful for sleep. So it's a good one for nighttime, or if you're just stressed out and you needed a break, or if your muscles are really tight, it does help. And then the fourth one is called Brain Power. Brain power.
Matt 46:07
Does that one come in a neon bottle?
Kristina 46:12
No, it is a, this is kind of the only herb that might not really fit into North America. Because I tried to use herbs that were common that you could grow yourself, but this one has ashwagandha in it, which you can grow here, but it's not native to here. It's native to India. And that is a root. And it actually has a lot of health benefits. It is one of the top herbs used for anxiety, for decreasing anxiety, for decreasing stress, but also has a lot of cognitive benefits, probably for the same reasons. Cinnamon is a very good herb for cognitive function and memory. And then there is an herb called skull cap. That's actually native to this area. I did not know that. I asked one of the local gardeners. I didn't know that. So that one's for your brain in terms of like brain function, memory, cognitive alertness. So they're all geared towards a health benefit, but they all have their own unique flavor and taste.
Matt 47:14
Awesome. Well, if people want to find out about your personal training, want to find out about your tea, give them all that info. How can they find you?
Kristina 47:23
Awesome. Yeah. So the best place to get information about BESTEA is I want to say Instagram. It's at drink BESTEA. All one word.
Matt 47:33
B-E-S-T-E-A. Not two T's.
Kristina 47:36
B-E-S-T-E-A. Yes. And we do have a website. We do local delivery for free. We don't ship our iced tea, but we will deliver locally for free over a certain minimum. But you can order the iced tea from there or hot tea. We do actually sell the same blends in hot tea. And that is drinkbestea.com. And then for my personal training business, you can go to gritlifefitness.com. That's my website. I do online classes or one-on-one personal training or partner training. So if you have a friend or partner you want to get fit with. And then if you live locally near Fresh Pond, if you're interested in an early morning boot camp class, you can
Matt 48:23
Be yelled at by you.
Kristina 48:24
You can email me. Yeah, you can get yelled at by me. I'll always try to correct your form. My email is courage at gritlifefitness.com. So the word courage, at gritlifefitness.com. So I'd love, you know, if you have any interest in the tea or with training, I'd love to hear from you.
Matt 48:43
Yeah. Well, thanks for sitting down and sharing your journey, your thoughts, stories, all that, and goodbye, listeners.
Kristina 48:50
Thank you.
Matt 48:51
So that's it from a conversation with Kristina. I'll put links in the show notes for you to find out more about Grit Life and BESTEA. And we didn't mention in the episode because it was not official yet, but you can now find her tea, BESTEA, at the O'Some Cafe in the Watertown Free Public Library. If you want to hear more episodes of the podcast, you can head over to LittleLocalConversations.com. There you can find all the episodes, information on upcoming live podcast events, and sign up for my weekly newsletter. And again, the Little Local Holiday Giveaway is going on right now through November 25th, or until I run out of gifts. So get in if you want one of these gifts at the website, again LittleLocalConversations.com slash friend. And anyone who signs up at $5 a month to support the podcast, or current friends who up their support by $5 will get a great local prize. Sign up, you get a prize. It's not a raffle. It's just, you do it, you get it. So the first prize will be given out on November 13th, where I'll be randomly selecting a friend to get two tickets to Mount Auburn Cemetery's solstice. Very popular events. They usually sell out pretty early, so that's why I moved it up a little bit earlier than the other gifts, to make sure there's still time for the winner to select their date to come. The rest of the prizes will be given out the day after Thanksgiving or whenever the gifts run out. I have 15 other gifts to give out. And they are two tickets to the opening weekend of Hamlet, put on by the Actors' Shakespeare Project. It's gonna happen in January. Got some gift cards to give away from Arsenal Yards, $100 gift card to Buttermilk and Bourbon, $100 gift card to Condesa, $100 gift card to Medium Rare, $100 gift card to Tori Jiro. Branch Line is giving away a couple of $50 gift cards. Coffee Plus 254, giving away two bags of freshly roasted coffee. Caldwell's Miscellaneous Fancy Goods, giving out a set of notepads, and Caldwell's best-selling rose bouquet pattern. Cass School of Floral Design is giving out a $75 class gift card. Eastern Clothing is giving away a $250 gift card. Fastachi is giving out a couple of $25 gift cards. Gore Place is giving out tickets to a free tour of the Gore Place Mansion for up to four people, or two free tickets to a concert in the Gore Place Carriage House. Mosesian Center for the Arts is giving out two tickets to the great New England Cookie Slam in December. And again, the Mount Auburn Cemetery is giving out two tickets to Solstice. So again, head on over to LittleLocalConversations.com slash friend , to help support the podcast, keep these conversations going, and get a great local prize. All right, and I want to give a few shout outs here to wrap things up. I want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who have given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. So I want to give them the appropriate credit, which is , this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. You can find out more about them at WatertownCulturalCouncil.org and MassCulturalCouncil.org. And a couple more shout outs to promotional partners. First, the Watertown Business Coalition. Their motto is Community is Our Business. Find out more about them and their events at WatertownBusinessCoalition.com. And lastly, Watertown News, which is a Watertown focused online newspaper. It's a great place to keep up to date with everything going on in this city. Check that out at WatertownMANews.com. So that's it, and till next time, take care .
