Tea and Me
Growing up in the South, the beverage my family always served at meals was iced tea, always sweetened and usually offered with slices of fresh lemon. It was made by adding four standard-sized tea bags to a couple of quarts of boiling water, allowing it to steep for five minutes, and pouring the tea, a cup of sugar, and additional water into a glass tea pitcher. Whatever wasn't served at the next meal needed to be refrigerated, lest it sour and turn bitter and nasty. When my grandmother decided to lose weight in the beginning of the 70s, she stopped using sugar and substituted 18 tiny saccharine tablets, which gave her tea a unique but not unpleasant flavor. She even used loose tea leaves to make hers from time to time, something I found pretty exotic.
When I was raising my own family, we didn't have tea every single day like I did when I was growing up, but I kept the fixings around, and it was still served at the homes of our parents and grandparents. My mother switched to drinking unsweetened tea at some point, insisting that it is just as good as if I didn't have taste buds to compare the two. My wife, the daughter of a second-generation Italian American and a Georgia farm kid, also grew up drinking iced tea, so we can see which part of her heritage played into that.
In 2016 I read a book about the history of tea, and I became obsessed with it. I learned when and where tea was first cultivated (China, third century AD), the name of the tea bush (camellia sinensis), and that after water, tea is the most consumed beverage by the human race. Now, we aren't talking about big pitchers of southern sweet tea here. The beverage I became obsessed with is the hot variety, ideally made from loose tea leaves, brewed with water heated to a precise temperature depending on the type (black, green, oolong, etc.).
I subscribed to tea catalogs, Upton's being my favorite and the one I recommend to anyone who wants to experience high-end teas. I bought a high-tech kettle, an entire piece of furniture to serve as a tea station in my kitchen. I have tea towels, brewing baskets, multiple teapots, favorite tea mugs, tea caddies, lots of canisters, and tea from all over the world, although Chinese Keemun, a hearty black tea that takes milk well, remains my all-time favorite. I have experienced Darjeelings that cost about as much as good weed does. I've been to tea shops and been served in the Japanese fashion. I didn't spare any expense or leave any questions unanswered in my quest to become a tea expert.
I eventually settled down and even started drinking tea from tea bags again, although I order Irish tea over the Internet, not the floor sweepings sold in American grocery stores. When I visited Northern Ireland a few years ago, one of my favorite parts was being able to order a pot of tea at any time of day in just about any restaurant. I even developed an expensive fondness for British biscuits, which I feel are superior to American cookies in every metric. On Wonder Woman's recent trip to Scotland, shortbread was my requested souvenir.
As a practicing alcoholic, I thought about having some pretensions about becoming a wine snob or a single-malt enthusiast, but I didn't have the patience or the finances for it, and all I really wanted was the effect anyway, and cheap pint bottles of Kentucky Gentleman whiskey for $4.95 did the trick. But as a man in long-term sobriety with a steady job and an understanding wife, I was free to become whatever you call a person who really loves tea. That's me.
(As I was writing this, I was suffering in medical segregation away from my bride who is usually withing arms reach when we are together. I'm recovering from COVID. Wonder Woman, being the awesome person she is, sensed my forlorn state, and offered the one thing that never fails to cheer me up, a nice hot cup of good tea, which she brewed and brought to me. I don't deserve her.)
Last 5 posts