Colonel De Gourmet Herbs & Spices

Colonel De Gourmet Herbs & Spices began with De Stewart, who grew up working in his grandfather's poultry and fish market and then in the family produce market. In 2005 he and his wife Susan started selling herbs, spices and blends at farmers' markets, and a year later they opened their first store at Findlay Market in Cincinnati. De passed away in 2018 and his son Ashley runs the business today, from stalls 133–135 at 1801 Race Street and a second store inside Newport on the Levee, across the river in Kentucky.

The stall stocks over 500 culinary herbs, spices and custom blends, from steak rubs and salt-free mixes to bourbon-smoked spices, chiles, salts, peppercorns and sugars, and the teas are a small shelf of about twenty within that. Everything on it is priced per ounce: Chai Tea, a black tea with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, allspice and pepper, is $3.00; Orange Spice Black and Hibiscus Zest $3.60; Citrus Chamomile $4.16; Pineapple Papaya Green on a Chinese sencha base $5.50; and Lavender Herbal, lavender with sage, $6.61 the ounce.

The rest of the tea shelf is fruit-flavoured blacks (apricot, blackberry, raspberry, passion fruit, tropical fruit, ginger peach), a Winter Blend black, a decaf chai made of spices alone, and house herbals named for the market, for Shakespeare and for an Eagles song. The site explains how much an ounce is, since most customers buy spices by that measure, and orders over $35 ship free in the US. The Findlay Market stall opens Tuesday to Sunday and closes Mondays, like the market itself.