Guess the Tea

Here’s a small part of a chapter from THE HEART OF TEA. Can you guess the tea that is under discussion?

You can make this tea up quickly with very hot water, or slowly at a lower temperature, You can cold brew it and ice it. You can slightly sugar it and use it to trap people who claim not to drink white or green teas.

It’s not a cheap tea, as so many things can go wrong on the processing. It’s quite susceptible to the weather. It needs to be shipped right and stored right.

Purists will howl at this – I actually have tried some from India; and it is cheap and cheerful. It’s like the difference between a good steak and a great steak; and at a quarter the price, the Indian stuff was not unappreciated. Certainly not when downing it by the pint glass.

It is a tea you can have a complex and evolving relationship with – you can drink it endlessly for weeks, then just move on – until you find it has worked its way to the back of your tea cupboard, all alone and unappreciated. Then the romance begins again.

Maybe it’s more like an old friend. You might not see each other for some time; but when you do, you just pick up where you left off.

So, if you haven’t already, find some time to introduce yourself to <NAME OF TEA>. An old friend. We go way back.

4 Comments

  1. I don’t know but I’m trying to remember what you said about a tea from India that I wasn’t familiar with. The one that looked like circular dried worms?
    Anyway, for some reason I hadn’t really seen the Heart of Tea site recently, looks nice and of course I signed up for the mailing list at once!

  2. Every good tea is the right answer.

  3. It’s not the ringowrm tea, @Jackie, which isn’t from India anyway. And yes @xavier , one of the reasons I posted it that way is there are hardly any clues in the text. You have to work for it!