Category: Tea & coffee

A Cup of Darjeeling

Daily life / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / Tea & coffeeLeave a comment

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With characteristic brightness frequently likened to newly minted coins, fragrant aromas, and sophisticated, complex flavours — delicate, even flowery (more stem than petal, as one expert blender put it), with hints of apricots and peaches, muscat grapes, and tasty nuts — it’s the world’s premium tea, the “champagne of tea.”… Darjeeling tea is often sold not just by single estate like wines, but also by flush, or harvesting season, a term nearly exclusive to tea from the far northeast of India… While Darjeeling tea’s unique … click below for more ↓

More Musings on Tea

Daily life / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / Tea & coffee / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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Back in 1946, while England was still recovering from the deprivations of WWII and under rationing, the prolific George Orwell wrote his essay “A Nice Cup of Tea” with his eleven-step instructions for making what he considered the perfect cuppa.* But do they still stand today? Certainly, his notion of what makes a “strong” tea would be considered very strong by standards today. As the BBC noted in an article that debunked many of Orwell’s notions about making tea almost 60 years later, “The great … click below for more ↓

A Cup of Mao Jian

Food & Drink / History & Biography / Tea & coffeeLeave a comment

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The tea bag is an example of remarkable serendipity; an unexpected, simple invention that changed the world. But it was entirely unintended. Tea, from the camelia sinenis tree, is the most popular beverage in the world after water, and the most popular hot beverage period. Before the tea bag appeared, barely over a century ago, all tea was sold loose. Today more than 90% is sold in bags (if you include tisanes, or herbal “teas” that figure is about 70%*). For what is arguably the … click below for more ↓

Teas or Tisanes?

Critical Thinking / Food & Drink / Language & Grammar / Style & usage / Tea & coffeeOne Comment

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I suppose it’s crotchety of me, but whenever I hear the term “herbal tea” used to refer to an infusion of leaves or fruits that contains no actual tea, I get shirty. They’re actually not tea at all, they’re tisanes, a pleasant French word that means’herbal infusion.’ They should be called such and labelled appropriately in stores. Tea is, properly a plant originally from China: Camellia sinensis. How the word came to be used as a descriptor for any hot drink in which leaves were … click below for more ↓

The Perfect Cuppa

Food & Drink / Tea & coffeeLeave a comment

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I was incited to blog about the “perfect” cuppa by an article in The Guardian titled, “How to make tea correctly (according to science): milk first.” As a user of many tea bags – a single bag per cup – I must protest. You cannot possibly get a decent cup of tea that way. The milk cools the water too much for the tea to steep properly. It comes out like that stuff they serve in fast food places: greyish, diluted warm milk with a … click below for more ↓

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