When you've been married as long as I have (37 years next month, plus the 3 years we lived in sin prior to tying the knot) you know full well it becomes a challenge to find a unique and satisfactory gift for your significant other when Christmas rolls around. Props to my hubs for scoring major points this year. The surprise hit: a Twinings tea sampler. My Type A self is having a blast methodically working through all the various flavors.
I've been a tea drinker most of my adult life. Growing up in the South, it's part of your DNA. Especially when you grow up in a teetotaler household. There's a reason they call it that!
It's the iced version of tea that Southerners adore. And it's usually so sweet it'll make your teeth ache. My mom brewed a batch of iced tea just about every day. She had this one particular pan that was the only pan used for brewing tea. She brought water to a boil and dropped a couple of tea bags into the boiling water, then turned it off and let them steep while we were away all day at work or school. When we got home, she poured the tea into a two quart pitcher. The tea only filled maybe a third. The rest, she filled with tap water. And of course, at some point she added sugar. I remember one of the dead giveaways my dad was on yet another diet was if Mom intentionally left the sugar out of the tea.
Sounds simple, but try making consistently good iced tea day after day for thirty years, then get back to me. Anyone who's had that gawdawful powder mix 'tea' out of a garish school-bus-yellow tureen at a chain restaurant knows why this is an important skill set.
Somewhere along the way I made the transition from sweet tea, to pink packet tea, to unsweet (with lemon!), and have never looked back. But that's a story for another day. Today, I want to focus on the other kind of tea: the hot stuff.
For whatever reason, I just never did get on board with drinking coffee. My mom never drank it because she didn't want to stain her teeth. Because of course tea wouldn't stain your teeth . . . Dad drank a cup or two in the morning, but never obsessed over it, and I don't recall him ever drinking it on the weekends. It just wasn't a thing at our house. When I finally got around to having a cup, it was kinda like my first time trying booze: Yuck! How did this stuff ever get so popular? It's like vanilla. How can something that smells so great taste so gross? Unlike booze, my opinion on coffee has remained unchanged.
The only time I recall enjoying a cup of coffee was at a great ski lodge after a fabulous fun day on the slopes. The coffee was doctored up with Kahlua, or maybe Amaretto, and a mountain of whipped cream. That I could stomach. But between the atmosphere and the calories, just not sustainable.
If you don't drink coffee, that leaves your choice of hot morning beverage somewhat restricted. Hence the tea. I used to just heat up a cup of iced tea, like a savage. Then I progressed to dunking a tea bag into some hot water (didn't even have to be boiling). I'm ashamed to admit that actually passed for 'brewing tea' in my youth. And yes, I was that girl walking around with a tea bag dangling out of my cup. Mea culpa.
But something happened along the way. I have a sort of ADD, 'ooh, shiny' thing going on. I'm a sampler. I love to try new things and learn all about them. Get into the weeds. Down the rabbit hole. Years ago, it was about wine. I wanted to go all Sideways, but I just didn't have the nose for it. Then when the craft beer craze came along, yep, I am that girl who loved perusing the menu at my favorite watering hole to see what crazy new concoction was on tap. Those hobbies went by the wayside when I gave up booze.
One day as I was watching Jean Luc Picard order an "Earl Grey, hot", I decided right then and there I needed to branch out from the generic store brand bulk tea bags and see what else was on offer in the wide world of tea.
People, I have barely begun to scratch the surface.
There are so many options! You've got the bagged and the loose. Caff and decaf. The black and the green and the white. The oolong and the assam and the lapsang souchong. The chai. The matcha. The big name producers and the mom-and-pop artisinals. And that doesn't even begin to touch the teas that are made from something other than the camellia sinensis plant. It's glorious.
It's also easy to get overwhelmed. I've come up with a system. I have a specific tea assigned for each morning of the week. Then I hold a tasting competition; a Tea Olympics, if you will. I sample various teas. On whims, on recommendations, on throwing a dart. No Tea Day is guaranteed. Any tea can lose their spot at any time. If I find a tea that I love love LOVE more than one of those on my schedule, the gold medal winner gets the spot, and the silver/bronze/loser is relegated to the Wild West of my afternoon rotation, where anything goes.
My daily morning menu:
- Monday: Earl Grey (EG is sorta grandfathered/Picarded in)
- Tuesday: Darjeeling (a relative newcomer)
- Wednesday: Ceylon Orange Pekoe (recently ousted H-E-B's Chocolate Rooibos)
- Thursday: Yorkshire Gold (I learned of this winner via Jane Friedman's blog - see below)
- Friday: Assam (I don't remember where I heard about assam, but it is AMAZING)
- Saturday: Yerba Mate, but it's definitely on the bubble
- Sunday: a Free Day so I can keep trying new flavors
As you can see, I'm up to my eyeballs in tea. I drink it pretty much all day long. And yes, I intersperse with plain old H2O, in case you are worried about my hydration status. I would love to hear your recommendations. Competition helps keep these teas on their tea toes, so to speak. Any and all newcomers welcome. Let's hear those recs!
Click-O-Rama
No affiliate links here. Just stuff I've enjoyed learning about.
- Camellia sinensis is the scientific name of the plant most teas are made from. And yes, it is related to the camellia plant we think of mainly for its flowers. The Camellia part is meant to honor a botanist by the name of Kamel; and the sinensis indicates it is from what is now China. You can make tea out of just about any plant, though. And you can use the other parts of the plant, not just the leaves. As an experiment a few years ago, I let the Texas dandelions grow wild in my back yard. I harvested them for salad, and brewed up a little tea with them as well. It wasn't terrible. But way too much work and too unsightly. The dandlions are now relegated to the back back yard. And no, that is not a typo. We have the back yard, the part inside the fence. Then we have the back back yard, which stretches from the back fence to the river. We let that grow wild until early summer to nourish the pollinators. Then the hubs mows it until winter arrives. But I digress.
- I mentioned I learned about Yorkshire Gold via Jane Friedman's blog, which is kinda weird, because Jane's blog is first and foremost about writing. But recently she has started polling her followers about all kinds of interesting topics. Here's the full article with lots of other tea recs. This is probably where I heard about assam, and I have tried a couple of the Harney's here also. How could I resist a tea named Victorian London Fog?
- This is a fascinating article about the Jeff Bezos of drug dealers. It amused me that he sometimes smuggled his illicit cargo in green tea packaging. Kinda ironic when green tea, in fact lots of teas in general, are supposed to be so healthy. Drug Bezos must have a sense of humor.
- There are so many wonderful craft/artisinal tea companies out there. I really enjoyed sampling the teas from August Uncommon, especially their Silencio. My writer friend Dan alerted me to a shop he recommends in Pittsburgh called Prestogeorge. They are known for their coffee, but they have tea also. Haven't had a chance to try them yet. Stay tuned!
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