teascapades of a tea newbie

Well, I write this blog partially with the tea newcomer in mind, and he’s curious about tea. He writes some very funny non-tea-related blogs, and I knew he’d do something entertaining with it. And that he certainly did. 

One important thing to remember: this is just the beginning with Jim and tea. He’s already agreed to be a recurring character on the teablog. Without further ado, I bring you our guest teablogger:

I like to try new things, and while tea isn’t “new” to me, having access to someone who might know a bit about tea is. In the past, I tried tea as a substitute for coffee, specifically Lipton tea. Everyone knows that Lipton is the name in mass produced tea. Right? Right?

So I tried it, and honestly it made me sick to my stomach.Not initially, but after a couple cups. I found it was a little harsh on an empty stomach (much like coffee can be) and eventually I gave it up as a bad job.

Nearly a decade later, enter Twitter, toss in a mildly humorous and nearly contentious miscommunication spawned from incorrectly linking to people’s blogs. . . and I found Ken. And in finding Ken, found someone to ask all my annoying questions about the mysterious world of tea.

I tapped that resource for the first time in the middle of a grocery trip this past weekend. Without copy and pasting the exchange, essentially it amounted to this: Assuming Ken was more or less waiting by his phone/pc for my tweet, I said, “quick, I’m at the store, what tea should a newbie try?” and he, apparently actually sitting by his phone/pc waiting for my tweet began to guide me to the best of his abilities to my best choice.

Yeah. . . so there are a lot of options. And I tried tweeting this picture to Ken, but I was in a wifi-less store, and it kept timing out. So after Ken had asked a couple of questions about what sorts of tastes I preferred, he offered me four or five options. And believe it or not, the store only had one of them. I mean, are you looking at that shelf? That’s just the Stash choices I could fit in the picture. . . Anyway, we settled on Stash English Breakfast.

Ken wanted me to get filters, but I couldn’t find teafilters to save my life, so that apparently put loose-leaf tea out of the equation. But fear not, regardless, of whether this tastes like ass, I will totally try loose-leaf tea because it’s different, and I like trying different things. Not ass. That was probably misleading how I wrote that in there. But different things.

So I had the tea. Now, I drink coffee in the mornings ordinarily, and I won’t lie, sometimes when I finish my gigantic travel mug full o’ joe, I feel a little bit like I’m going to throw up. That doesn’t stop me from doing the same thing the following day, mind you, cause my mama didn’t raise no quitters, but I knew I wouldn’t try tea on a day that I was already queasy from caffeine overdose. Today was that day!!

The very first thing I did was find my finest heirloom porcelain tea cup. Because tea evokes all sorts of images in my head of cultured snobby people drinking tea out of fine china with their pinkies in the air.

Mission accomplished. I filled it with the finest tap water moneycan buy and prepared my tea kettle microwave.

Ken had told me to heat the cup, and essentially what I did was.. . heated the cup and water in the microwave until it boiled. Once it boiled,I removed it from the microwave and plopped the tea bag in it.

Ken (and the packaging) said to steep it for three minutes. I set my duck timer (the duck timer is win/win/win. 1) “When Timer Ends Duck.” That’sfunny. I can see people actually ducking when the timer goes off (as instructed),2) ducks are funny, 3) when I use it with my kids I can blame the duck for why they have to finish doing whatever it is they’re doing, “sorry kids, the duck quacked.”)

So I steeped. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t trust Brownian motion to disperse my tea evenly throughout my hot water, so I. . . in the absence of Ken’s learned guidance. . . bobbed the tea bag up and down in the water a couple times. I didn’t continually do it, because Ken’s instructions hadn’t explicitly spelled out how I was to steep, but he hadn’t mentioned bobbing, so I felt certain I was going outside the framework of accepted tealore, but I fucking did it anyway, because sometimes, in the absence of instructionsto the contrary, you just go with your gut. Plus I’m American, and if history has taught me one thing, it’s that when Americans get a hold of tea, they do unexpected things with it.

Further to my discussion of Brownian motion…when the timer was done, and the duck quacked and I had ‘ducked’ and then chuckled at how funny I think I am. . . I threw the bag away and I stirred the tea. Because it seemed to me at the time that if I didn’t trust Brownian motion to disperse my tea evenly through the water, I may as well help the process of mixing and get a good uniform dispersion. Ken had told me not to squeeze the bag out, so I didn’t.

Finally, I was ready to drink my tea. But, as I was about totake my first sip two things occurred to me. 1) It was so hot I was going to burn the shit out of myself, and 2) pinkies up, yo!

Something they don’t teach you at tea academy is that if you’re using a big giant Bugs Bunny coffee mug as your fine china, it’s really heavy and you should be careful not to be too cavalier with your pinky erection lest you spill hot tea all over yourself when the mug slips from your grasp.

Okay, I don’t know what the tea pros say, but when tea is so scalding hot you can barely tolerate it in your mouth? It’s also too hot to taste. So I waited a while longer. Because to quote Ralph Wiggums, “It tasteslike burning.”

It, okay and don’t hate on me here, tasted like Lipton.

Now Ken suggested that if I drank coffee with cream and sugar, I might enjoy tea the same way. I suspect so, and for whatever reason it never even occurred to me to add cream to tea. But my next attempt will be to add alittle and see if I like it better. The short answer to the question of ”isEnglish Breakfast a better choice than crappy ol’ Lipton?” may, unfortunately, have to be “no”. At least at this early tea age, I’m not really tasting any difference.