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Tea

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14:00 / 28.06.06

I love it.

I'm becomming more obssesed by the day. I've done a few searches on the 'lith and can find no mention, with the notable exception of Iamus, of decent tea that doesn't invovle milk, sugar, honey, vannila etc. I am appaulled. The slightest mention of green tea with lemon, green tea teabags or the sight of Stephen Fry assuring us of the qualty of Twinnings tea on the TV is enough to dislodge my head from my arsehole.

So, any other tea junkies lurking out there. I'm looking for recommemdations for tea - white, green, yellow, oolong, red, black ,pu-erh - tips from any serious tea brewers and any good intertron resources. If anyone has any question regarding this feel free to ask and I'll do my best.

I'm reaching out as my local tea mecca has recently closed down and I think this may have been the only establishment of its kind in the UK.

I drink tea mainly from China/Taiwan but open to a little Japanese or Vietnamese green from time to time. I honing my mad skillz in gongfu brewing and looking for other opinions as the net is a minefield of contradictions.

I've just acquired a thermal mug, that I can put loose leaf in, for the office and working life is far more palatable devoid of vending machine drinks. I'm currently enjoying my third mug from the same set of leaves of wild monkey king and beginning to sweat tea.

A tea habit is also very handy if you're looking for something to do with all that spare cash lying about, as the prices in the first link will show, although decent grades of tea can be purchased at far more reasonable prices. If you're just starting out I wouldn't recommend anything too dear as it can take a few months to start detecting differences in the finer brews and it pays to have some level of skill in preparation.
It will also allow you to make you're front room much cooler -

The tea has also prevented me from throwing a wobbler as I've lost this post twice before going to print, although I suppose it's the fault of the tea I'm writing this in the first place.

More links :

Blog

Wiki on Chinese Tea culture

Honk kong based site with a decent tea section*

* If this looks like an advert for funalliance feel free to delete

14:39 / 28.06.06

I love tea (Earl Grey/Lapsang/Chai etc mainstream baby mainstream), but am unfortunately a coffee con ur sewer. As I like my Earl weak with milk I feel I cannot contribute here (the shame) but I know some fun tea facts.

Did you know too much gunpowder green tea makes you hallucinate? Some call it the Jade Lady or so I've been told.

Keith, like a scientist

14:41 / 28.06.06

my family is English, so i was brought up on tea since i was a little one. We have been Tetley drinkers for ages, and i still cling to that particular brand as the perfect black tea.

Used to use milk, but I just drink it black, with sugar. It always calms me down, and gives me a more comfortable feeling in general. Maybe it's the nostalgia, that home cooking, feeling.

14:59 / 28.06.06

I'm getting into caffeine in general at the moment, or rather, getting _out_ of caffeine.

Like Keith H, I've been brought up on tea. We drank it at home, and at school. I used to claim tea to be the second elixir of life (after water). OK, 2nd equal, shared with a good scotch whiskey;-)

I've tried most of the typical black teas you find in supermarkets in the UK, some green, some red. Darjeeling is a nice gentle tea (black, weak, with lemon, yum). I fell in love with Thai tea, brewed by street vendors, served with ice and half a tonne of sweet condensed milk. It sounds hideous but under a baking Thai sun, it's amazing.

Post clubbing, I often turn up at house parties and go stright to the kitchen to make tea. It's part of my going out/coming home habit/ritual. Calming, but also reviving.

But.. since I started working and getting more into coffee (and I love coffee too), I've noticed some downsides to regular caffination. My fingers are sore - caffeine alters blood-flow to the extremities. I can't relax, I fidget and I feel crap in the mornings 'til after a shot of tea or coffee. Addictions unsetlle me, so I'm heading out..

A few sips of jasmine scented green tea at a curry house last night made me feel a bit woo-way.. (ok, i'd had two coffes earlier in the day).. nice buzzy, but really not what I needed on a "school night".

15:08 / 28.06.06

I recently had my first brush with Lady Grey tea--it's black like its masculine counterpart, but has a hint of orange and lemon flavouring to it. I prefer my tea with some milk and sugar, but this is good enough to drink by itself.

15:15 / 28.06.06

Kidninjah

Yeah I know what you mean about the tea buzz. Caffine usually has little effect on me - I can have 2 double expresso shots and go to bed as usual within the hour, also green and other ligher teas have little effect. Feed me a few litres of dark oolong tea or something similar, imbibed in a tiny cup over a period of hours and the mythical 'tea drunk' sets in - feeling elevated, spaced out and a comes with a complete ban on sleep for a few hours.

15:20 / 28.06.06

Bugger, the list of people I must treat with contempt is growing rapidly and to be honest I can't really be bothered. I think I'll change the summary to:

"Discussions on tea.
Talk of milk and/or sugar will slighlty annoy me".

15:30 / 28.06.06

In terms of Caffeine cups of black tea and espresso shots are about the same.

Proinsias, do you use the little bamboo brush to whisk the tea and everything? Hardcore.

15:46 / 28.06.06

Proinsias, do you use the little bamboo brush to whisk the tea and everything

No, that's the Japanese Tea Ceremony. I work along the lines of the Chinese tea ceremony - a lot less formal. There's a google video link in the first post after the gongfu link brewing which gives a rough idea of the energy I expend for a cup of tea. The demonstrator is by no means an expert but it gives an decent picture of it.

sibyline, beating Qalyn to a Q

17:29 / 28.06.06

i love tea. i visit tea rooms here in new york all the time. my favorite one is The Wild Lily Tea Room, where you can have your tea next to a koi pond. i personally prefer japanese green tea, but i also like oolong tea and occasionally have black tea when i feel like it.

alas, my life is a bit too hectic for fancy tea ceremonies. at work, i use the Ingenuitea, which makes loose tea brewing so much easier.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

17:43 / 28.06.06

Did you know too much gunpowder green tea makes you hallucinate?

*runs out to buy a sackload of gunpowder green tea*

17:50 / 28.06.06

I like yunnan and other black China teas but am DEFINITELY not a connoisseur - willing to be educated though... I think there's a tea merchant somewhere down near Borough...

18:43 / 28.06.06

Love tea. Have some stuff picked up in China (hua cha -- jasmine tea, and lung chin -- dragon well, a kind of musky green tea), but will drink anything. Currently eyeing empty cup which recently held green tea (some American brand, I think, got as Xmas gift).

I tend to dislike fruity fake-flavored tea, but sister-in-law turned me on to this cantaloupe-flavored white tea called Gypsy something that's actually really good.

There's unsweetened home-brewed iced chai in my fridge. I've mixed my own chai before, too -- ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, clove & black pepper with black tea (in China, called red tea). Sometimes it turns out nicely.

Some of my favorite tea, by the way, is hideously sugary & milky stuff the way they serve it in Sri Lanka. Some people don't like it -- it's more like a dessert soup. But that's fine with me.

Oh, and I have to plug Lipton's Yellow Label. Vastly superior to run-of-the-mill Lipton's (they served the stuff everywhere in China), but hell to find here in the states. Asian groceries sometimes. Usually, we get it by bugging people going to and from the Bahamas, where it's easy to find. Don't contempt me for liking it with m of the soy variety. No s, thanks.

Rooibos, by the way, should be drunk neat, but I've endured scorn from my Boer kin for going either way.

18:53 / 28.06.06

I miss tea. (And coffee, but that's neither here nor there.) About five years ago for some abstract reason my body started to refuse to tolerate Tea, and I'm not entirely sure why.

However, I now enjoy Herbal tea with a vengeance. Mint tea at work, or possibly Camomile, and I have also discovered the joy of Clipper Orange and Coconut tea, which I heartily recommend.

Also, I do like Rooibos, but with some sugar; I suspect this makes me a philistine.

19:43 / 28.06.06

No because I also like Rooibos too with a little bit of sugar in it.

Oooh, oooh, we need green gunpowder tea to make mint tea with and everyone here in Birmingham seems to look at us funny when ywe ask for it. Quantum, where are you getting it from?

I drink Jasmine tea a lot which the beautiful man makes for me. He also makes me green tea. He does it because he just has the tea knack, you know, not because I'm lazy and make him.

I drink naked Earl Grey in the morning. I used to drink it with milk but I don't like it like that anymore.

19:45 / 28.06.06

Er, I mean the tea is naked, not me. Although I quite often am but that's beside the point.

20:18 / 28.06.06

I also love tea, but can't drink it in large quantities of it without it playing havoc with my stomach...

*

20:23 / 28.06.06

I like tea, but as I am neither English nor Chinese or Japanese I make up my own tea ceremonies.

I boil up masala chai from scratch, though. It's not "right" but it is damn tasty. And includes both milk and sugar.

julius has no imagination

21:15 / 28.06.06

Well, I'm English, so I live on cups of milky tea, of the Tetley/PG Tips etc. variety.

OK, so I'm not English. But, my parents have had a major tea habit for years and we consume vast quantities of a very nice fair-trade organic Darjeeling at home. In the UK, at Uni, I mostly drink the tea my housemate buys, which tends to be the generic stuff. At first I occasionally bough fancier teas, but generally they weren't really worth the bother to me. Of the generic blended ones, Yorkshire Tea is a very nice one though.

Oh, and it's milk and no sugar for me.

21:23 / 28.06.06

Lula

Genmai Cha is Japanese green tea with toasted rice and works a treat with some dried mint. Your local Whittards should have some at a fairly decent price or if you look on line you'll get it dirt cheap.

21:25 / 28.06.06

I think ruling out milk and sugar will alienate not only many of us Brits (I do milk, no sugar) but also most of the middle east. Tea served with a healthy shovel of refined sugar is drunk everywhere from Morocco (where you get lots of mint.. mmm...) to err, somewhere near China, I guess.

21:47 / 28.06.06

I feel awfully outclassed reading all this stuff about Earl Gray and Asian tea and milk and all that. I live in the southern United States, where we drink our tea with ice and lemon, and the fact that it's sweet enough to cause diabetic comas is a given. Since I am(according to my family)a freak of nature, I occasionally drink it hot, which is a cardinal sin in Mississippi. I do drink a nice freezing cold cup to get me going in the morning, though.

22:24 / 28.06.06

Intersting, I wonder if anyone has ever explored the parallels between Christianity and Islam in their use of heavily sweetened tea as a catalyst for social activity, where the American South, the British heartlands and the Arab world have quite a bit in common.

22:59 / 28.06.06

Ooh I've been waiting for this thread (a bit too shy and new yet to start my own).

I have always loved herbal and japanese teas, but three years ago my beloved introduced me to black tea brewed properly (that is, steeped for at least three minutes, preferably loose leaf in a warmed teapot - you all know what I'm talking about). It's become a bit of an obsession (and yes, i do take milk, but no sugar - I am strong enough to take your contempt). I feel a sense of horror these days when I see people throw their cheap tea bag in the cup with the hot water and the milk all at once and wave it around a bit before yanking it out - ugh!

We recently discovered the most heavenly earl grey i have ever had. It's by a company called Clipper Teas - fair trade organic teas. If their early grey is that amazing I imagine their other teas must be pretty good as well.

The other tea that I have been yearning after but can't get here in Australia is Whittards Afternoon Tea blend - is that terribly poxy? A friend had some he'd brought from London and I thought it was divine, but when I visited the Whittards website I was a bit alarmed by the number of crazy fake fruity teas they had (an abomination of tea, if you ask me).

23:36 / 28.06.06

I'm a tea addict. I was booted off the caffeine team a few years ago so only drink herbal (neat). To console me the Tea Gods created two local companies that make outstanding tea in my tiny town!

Besides being lovely it makes me proud to buy local products from thoughtful companies working globally with farmers.

White Heron Organic

Portsmouth Tea Company

I'm also fond of making herbal teas and often drink raspberry leaf and lemon grass. My tea shelf is over flowing and the envy of many of my guests. When people gift me caffeinated teas I serve them to my guests.

Sadly one of my catsons went on a Gawdzilla Rampage a year ago and destroyed my tea set collection...it was my outre miniature tea set collection..I miss my Wog saucer....

I love rooibos, elderberry, and the very rare unsweetened non caffeinated black currant. For some reason black currant means dinky raisins in America and not the lovely fruit common in Europe...Sigh...

01:52 / 29.06.06

Tea!!!! It's the only other hot drink beside hot chocolate that I'll drink...

My favourites are:

Lotus Tea (drunk in Vietnam, in a little Cyclist cafe) - the real kind; it really put a dampener on my culture shock - so I wafted around in the alien city of Hanoi completely at peace... la la la!

Unidentified Indian Tea - probably homegrown tea; I first tasted this in India; it's basically very hot tea sweetened with plenty of sugar and hot milk added, and it tastes divine for some reason - perfect with crispy roti and spicy food.

I also experienced a little tea ceremony in Singapore; complete with the whisk and everything, the tea was very bitter; but they had those delicious little biscuits - with green tea leaves in them. I'm looking for the best recipe for those tea leave cookies - anyone have any?

Gunpowder tea causes hallucinations? For sure?? Considering the amount of tea I usually drink in one sitting with rice crackers (about two pots of jasmine pearl tea), perhaps I better not... or perhaps I shall!

02:57 / 29.06.06

I think ruling out milk and sugar will alienate not only many of us Brits (I do milk, no sugar) but also most of the middle east. Tea served with a healthy shovel of refined sugar is drunk everywhere from Morocco (where you get lots of mint.. mmm...) to err, somewhere near China, I guess.

That was kinda the idea - to see if there were many people around here who drank their tea straight. I have no problem wth sugary, milky black tea it just seems like asking for a whisky & coke at a malt whisky festival.

I do enjoy the occasional chai with full cream milk and honey all whisked up although I consider it more of a milky cocktail with tea as an optional, not really required, ingredient.

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

03:23 / 29.06.06

I have a deep love for Indian spiced tea, an absolutely beautiful morning drink and wonderful cure for a sore throat. While I agree that it would be truly absurd to sully this marvellous drink with milk, and while I take no sugar with it per se, I have developed a tendency to sweeten it with a healthy dose of honey – a substance I’ve no liking for normally, but the sickly honey taste seems to interact perfectly with the spiciness and tea flavour to weave a lovely complex flavour that’s just perfect to bring a little light to grey morning when one would rather not be out of bed at all, let alone at work.

09:19 / 29.06.06

Take one teabag, nambarrie or punjana preferred,
put in a bone china mug, (white on the inside please and a very thin lip)
pour on freshly boiled hot water,
leave for 5 minutes at least.
Remove teabag (and put on little teabag saucer for reuse later if you're my granny),
drink every 1 to 2 hours,

aaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

09:36 / 29.06.06

I think Chai (spicy indian tea to you philistines) is supposed to be brewed for ages and be mostly milk with lashes of honey, like Proinsias' nightmare. Don't go to Goa dude.

Damn, the wikipedia Gunpowder tea article is a stub.
*web fu interlude*
Wow, the green tea jade lady thing is a famous horror story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (read it here) in which drinking too much opens communications with the spirits. Mordant, check this quote out;
"The fluid, which is propagated hence through one class of nerves, returns in an altered state through another, and the nature of that fluid is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than, as I before remarked, light or electricity are so.
By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more frequently disturbed as to equilibrium. This fluid being that which we have in common with spirits, a congestion found on the masses of brain or nerve, connected with the interior sense, forms a surface unduly exposed, on which disembodied spirits may operate: communication is thus more or less effectually established."

I'm trying to find out if it really is a hallucinogen, someone said about the story It is very famous and has been written about repeatedly -- partly because "green tea" was seen and still is seen as a hallucinative drug. so the jury's still out.

09:46 / 29.06.06

Lula- apparently in Birmingham, Snowhill & Moor St. is the place for fair trade tea, they must have some green for you. I'm surprised it's so hard to find though, just another reason I left the midlands :-)

lonely as a cloud...

09:47 / 29.06.06

sorenson - thank you *SOOOO* much for that link! My local Tesco used to stock Clipper teas - the "Specialiteas" in particular, and I absolutely loved their Bourbon Vanilla tea - lovely Assam with a hint of vanilla. But they stopped stocking it. Bastards.

I love tea. 'specially Indian teas, a nice strong cup of Assam with a drop of milk is my favourite.

12:11 / 29.06.06

I think Chai (spicy indian tea to you philistines) is supposed to be brewed for ages and be mostly milk with lashes of honey, like Proinsias' nightmare.

Don't listen to that goon, man. I've seen him quaff healthy doses of the stuff, loaded with milk and cinammon, in his time. Just because his taste has become a bit more refined of late doesn't mean there aren't skeletons in the closet. Sugary, milky skeletons that made him go Mmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Will get back to this thread as soon as I've got the time to do it some justice.

15:20 / 29.06.06

a cup of lapsang suchong has as much caffeine as a shot of espresso? not believing that, sorry. lapsang doesn't give me the jitters until i'm at least a couple of pints in.

19:32 / 29.06.06

Quoting myself from further up the thread:

I do enjoy the occasional chai with full cream milk and honey all whisked up although I consider it more of a milky cocktail with tea as an optional, not really required, ingredient.

Goon? oh stick you, your mama to and your daddy.

So there.

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