Summer Hydration Secret

I graduated college in 2020, from my childhood bedroom, having a tantrum about making waffle cones while my brother paraded around the house with cutouts of my face on popsicle sticks.

This means I also started my career during the pandemic as the second finance hire at a start-up in Illinois. 6:30 a.m. Zoom stand-ups sounded pretty good with the promise of being off by 3:30 to enjoy my summer afternoons.

Instead, days went until 8 p.m., and my only time not working was when I took my lunch, which was 30 minutes of me sitting in a hot tub trying to convince myself that this was my calling (it wasn’t).

I grew up in a water household. Outside of my father’s soda addiction when I was a child (we discovered our house flooded on the way to get Diet Mountain Dew), we drank water.

My experimentation out of the water realm began in late high school when I developed a fascination with Moon Juice, and grew even greater when I began to study bits of herbalism in college.

Shackled in spreadsheets, I used my hot tub time as a way to reconnect with my creativity, whimsy, and give me a will to live by means of a “fun beverage.”

My beverage creativity has felt a bit halted lately: the same herbs, flowers, fruits, and salts, until last week, when, I found organic fresh aloe.

My Fresh Aloe Source

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I’ve never worked with fresh aloe before because I haven’t been able to find it organic, and even though you are peeling it, to properly treat fresh aloe, it needs to go through numerous soaking rounds to lose its bitter notes.

I skinned my aloe, looked in my fridge, and this Mango, Green Tea, Manuka Honey, Limeade was born.

Recipe:

1 aloe leaf, or ~1/2 cup of food-grade aloe gel, or aloe water