Licking Rocks

What can be experienced beyond a simple tea infusion?

In an unusual collaboration with the Saint Charles pharmacy in Vienna, we explored future food perspectives – specifically around tea culture.

Tea is often consumed for its purely functional reasons. For example, for physical ailments or for warming when feeling cold. But what if relaxing places from nature could be tasted and experienced in a multi-sensory way? What if valuable active ingredients would be integrated in a more tasteful and aesthetic way?

Lichens have the unique ability to soak up the flavor of the environment in which they grow. They love to thrive in refreshing alpine mountain air, in fragrant cloud forests or on rough coastlines.

Inspired by Far Eastern tea culture, mindfulness was placed at the very center of the design-series LICKING ROCKS. The associative teacup was designed from the most elementary material, natural stone, and deliberately generates space for your tea-drinking time.
HINTERTHAL is the first experiential tea infusion based on lichen, an organism of high nutritional value and future relevance.