I love tea. I struggle without it. As Sydney Smith said Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea?-how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea. A time before tea, unthinkable.
"If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty."
Japanese Proverb
I also love the position of tea in society (not to mention in the Asterix books) and all the things I associate with it. Warmth and friends and blue & white china.
We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.
Rudyard Kipling
Now, I like good tea (love it in fact), but am happy to drink pretty bog standard tea too. This is especially the case at work where my tea may be made by one of the 12 people in my team, most of who produce cups of tea that I enjoy and am very grateful for. However, sometimes I get a cup of tea I cannot bare to drink. This has happened a couple of times when people have accidentally added sugar. Tastes awful but hay accidents happen, also did I mention 12 people? Thats a large round, mistakes are inevitable. I won't drink it though.
The worst tea though is when the tea bag has been left in for 5 minutes of so, and then squeezed, and stirred and pushed about. It not only makes the tea overly strong, but also bruises the tea leaves, increasing the amount of tanin released and the bitterness of the tea. I have theories of correlation between people who put sugar in their tea and people who squeeze tea bags, but they are very judgemental and quite rude, so I won't go into them here :)
Tea making at work isn't helped by the fact we have an urn to provide our hot water, so the water is constantly kept at just below boiling point. This means there is never any freshly boiled water, and thus tea cannot be made properly in my opinion.
Thats just black tea - don't get me started on Green Tea. I just don't let anyone at work brew green tea for me anymore. After several months of tea stress I decided the safest tea to settle for at work is a plain redbush blend. Colleagues can make it like a normalcup of black tea, and no matter how much they squeeze and pound the bag, they can do little harm.
I favour loose tea over tea bags (predictable aren't I), but I feel it would just be unfair to ask people at work, making 12 cups of tea, to use loose tea. I'm not a total tea-nazi.
Gee, this post did get quite ranty. I feel guilty, but my tea-related opinions stand.
1 comments:
I just read your comments on your love of tea; they were pretty funny. I can see you take tea drinking very seriously! Over here I drink unsweetened iced tea but now that I got a beautiful tea diffuser (?) for Christmas this year I plan to develop my taste for warm tea. I used to drink warm tea with a bit of milk and sweetener years ago (please don't roll your eyes!). I am always open to pointers! Well, just wanted you to know I enjoyed your post.
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