Two entrepreneurial college students have brewed up a business with local roots — and leaves.

They call their beverage Menno Tea, a commercially produced drink that's based on a popular homemade beverage, meadow tea.

"What we have in the bottle here is a pretty close representation of what we would drink at home," said Hans Weaver.

Weaver, a Goshen College student from New Holland, and classmate Niles Graber Miller launched Menno Tea at college this spring.

The name Menno Tea plays on the popularity of meadow tea in the Mennonite and Amish communities.

And the recipe isn't that far from the way Weaver's grandmother makes the tea — a black-tea base, with mint and lemon.

"The companies we work with say it is something unique," Graber Miller said.

Graber Miller, of Goshen, Ind., a sophomore business major, didn't drink meadow tea growing up, but he likes Weaver's version.

Graber Miller and Weaver, a junior business major, began selling their tea this spring at the Goshen College campus café.

They took it to a Mennonite convention over the summer before getting it into some retail stores in Goshen.

Meanwhile, they've graduated from personally producing every bottle to hiring outside companies to make the beverage with their oversight.

Since July, they've sold out their initial order of 10,000 bottles, plus their self-produced bottles, generating nearly $25,000 in revenue.

That sounds like a lot of cash, but it was only enough to cover their expenses, not pay them a salary.

The two students recently got a new shipment of 30,000 bottles as they get more stores — including some here — to carry the item.

"We're pretty much declaring this month that it is a legitimate business," Weaver said.

Helping to spread the news about Menno Tea locally is John Smucker, chief executive officer of Bird-in-Hand Corp.

Smucker ran into Weaver and Graber Miller in July at the Mennonite Church USA Convention in Pittsburgh, where Menno Tea made its first splash off-campus.

Smucker knew Weaver from the student's younger days as a lifeguard and hotel clerk at the corporation's Bird-in-Hand Family Inn.

Struck by the students' vision and drive, Smucker decided to give their business a boost.

He offered to help distribute 5,500 bottles by selling it at Bird-in-Hand Corp.'s businesses and by placing the item at local supermarkets.

So he has the corporation's Bird-in-Hand Restaurant and bakery selling it.

And Smucker has arranged for Oregon Dairy to stock the product.

Sold in 16-ounce glass bottles, it retails for $1.99.

"I see some entrepreneurship coming through here. I'm just supporting a couple guys that have an idea," Smucker said.

Smucker, who has been drinking meadow tea since childhood, said that while Menno Tea isn't an exact replica, the taste will be familiar to many locals.

"It has a good aftertaste that reminds you of — if you've grown up on meadow tea — meadow tea," he said.

The tea wasn't the first idea for the students. Each had his own earlier forays into business.

Graber Miller sold advertising on the side of his Volkswagen bus.

Weaver had sold homemade sodas when he attended Eastern Mennonite University.

Weaver's sodas mimicked some Coke products that became hard to get when the university cafeteria switched to Pepsi.

He used syrups made from scratch for root beers and green apple sodas, a carbonation machine, and bottles and caps used by home brewers.

Later, the equipment and method was repurposed for the early versions of Menno Tea.

After an April kickoff party at college, they got the order for several thousand bottles for the July convention in Pittsburgh.

To make that many bottles, Weaver and Graber Miller tried to find a bottler, rather than try to make that quantity themselves by hand.

But they ran into trouble because bottling plants had a minimum order that far exceeded what the entrepreneurs estimated they'd sell.

They eventually convinced a Pittsburgh bottler to agree to produce 10,000 bottles, half its usual minimum order.

By this time, they also had changed the way they made the tea, enlisting a company in Georgia to make syrup based on their meadow tea.

This way, the tea would not go bad while also meeting strict regulations about how tea must be produced, Graber Miller explained.

"It is, of course, always going to be better when you're making it with fresh mint leaves — that is something that in the future we want to replicate," Weaver said.

Weaver and Graber Miller said they eventually would like to get more of this authentic taste into the tea by growing the leaves in Lancaster County and using them to make the tea directly.

While they will continue selling their tea, they will delay until graduation any plan to turn it into a full-time business and bring it back to Lancaster County.

"Turkey Hill is a great company but we want to be the locally grown and produced tea in Lancaster County," Weaver said.

They also are conscious of the many variations of meadow tea. They say they will continue to work to improve their own.

Unlike their version, which starts with black tea, some other recipes use only the mint tea leaves, which results in a more pale green tea.

A recipe in "More with Less," a traditional Mennonite cookbook, calls for two sliced lemons, two cups of sugar and two cups of packed mint leaves for one gallon.

This reporter's grandmother makes her meadow tea by freezing the leaves and then making a concentrate without lemon or a black tea.

During the interview for this story, Weaver and Graber Miller sampled some she had recently made.

"It is definitely more the fresh garden taste you cannot produce in a concentrate," Weaver said of the tea.

"You can almost taste the earthy bitterness of the leaf. Yeah, this is what I'm used to."

And after meeting Weaver and Graber Miller, I took a bottle of their Menno Tea to my grandmother for another taste test.

She noted that it didn't taste exactly like her own, suggesting that maybe it was because of the lemon or because it had less sugar.

But she was OK with that distinction.

"Yeah, I believe that'll go over," she concluded. "I like the taste of that."