Tea rules because you can get 100 bags of decent quality for a couple bucks or 20 bags from distant shores hand selected by the bearded tea master of the forbidden mountains and it’s like 8 bucks
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Boy and Pu'ehr can be complicated. I'm working my way through a sample pack of raw. loose & cake, and ripe, loose & cake. I'm inclined to ripe. The elite grades are eye watering prices around here, too. Is that the pu'ehr packed into an orange you refer to?
I fucking love tea but you gotta upgrade from the bags. I'm not even being a snob. It's just better. I use one of those steel filter things I can put in the cup and dump tea in. As lazy as possible. It's just so good. People told me to switch and when I finally did, wooo they were right.
This is not what's happening but it *feels* like what is in the bag is half-strength-flavor. And somehow the loose leaf from some store tastes extra strength but in a great way. I don't know. I'm smoking a joint rn so I don't have a sensitive palette.
I have one of those cups w/ the strainer too, and a lid. It's great b/c I can take the strainer out, remove the lid, and put the strainer right there on the lid until I go back to the kitchen.
Exactly, Tea is meant to be steeped from Loose leaves, and beer served from Glass bottles. Anything less is not nearly as good. I do keep the odd kind of teabag in my house where the blend doesn't come as loose but other than that its loose all the way.
I've got anything from cheap $10 for 500g teas up to expensive $100 for 50g tea
The only thing that irks me about tea is when I find a kind I love and then the company that makes it discontinues it... I'm down to 150g from a Kilo of the kind my wife and I discovered on our honeymoon 12 years back
Cut a teabag open, empty on a saucer, check the powdery, dusty content. Lash out on some good loose tea, Japanese, Chinese, Sri Lankan/Indian, steep and check the mostly whole leaves. Large steel filter OK, but remove it after steeping.
I prefer loose tea. I make a liter pot. My glass teapot is wide at the bottom to allow the leaves to bloom. It narrows near the top and the lid has a steel mesh to strain. I pour it into a thermal carafe which keeps the tea hot for hours so I can enjoy it.
The mountains are forbidden because that's where they have "re-education" camps. The tea master is bearded because he hasn't had a day off since 1989. But goddammit do I love Dragon Pearls.
Coffee addict here: I don’t razz the tea drinkers for this exact reason. Coffee drinkers get hit for $20 for an 12 oz bag of middling beans. Cant argue with the economics for the tea crowd.
I have actually been leaning toward tea rather than coffee in the recent months. Not sure why. But I am cooling on my life long enjoyment of the coffee bean.
My neighborhood whose family is from Sri Lanka went back and visited and she brought me back 3 lbs of tea loose and in bags. The stuffing bags was remarkably better than the stuff here in Canada but the loose stuff was exquisitely good.
(Connoisseurs drink it "loose leaf" and the most expensive of these you can get at most places is some version of "monkey picked black". I think my local place had it at $20 for 2 ounces?)
Amen. Much like when I used to drink beer, I cultivate a taste for the absolute cheapest (anyone remember Goebel?). That way, when I was too poor for the good stuff, I was still okay, and it made the good stuff (like Heineken or Amstel) that much better. Same with tea.
I have been a big fan of tea for years! I started out microwaving water and using tea bags but now I use an electric kettle and nicer tea bags/loose leaf! The upgrade was definitely worth it
Is the US the only country in the world where kettles are not ubiquitous?
I can't imagine life without one, whether it's electric or an old-fashioned stove top whistling kettle. And I'm not even a tea drinker!
I need a kettle for my cafetière, amongst many other uses.
I’m not exactly sure why electric kettles aren’t as common but I remember that Technology Connections has a pretty good explanation! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c
Not sure how i ended up drinking tea. Both parents drank coffee. Dad's mom was from London, then Canada, so she always drank tea- Red Rose. Tea is my morning wake-up.
I was coffee all my life for the most part. Dabbled in teas a couple times but taking more of the plunge now. I like a warm drink at night and stay away from coffee after noon
To each their own but my simple kettle works for coffee and tea! I also have a backpacking pot that I used once to make tea with coals from a fire and it was pretty fun to use!
I’m a tea drinker, and I’ve got a subscription for my favourite teas, and get other stuff as it catches my eye. They also send little sampler packets, with each order!
Yes, you're right but it's very difficult to get 'whole leaf' tea that isn't extortionate. There was a conversation about this a few months ago here and this place seems to be the bomb: https://www.ringtons.co.uk
But Tea is Not meant to be consumed in bags. The Teabag was invented as a means to offer SAMPLES of tea to clients but those clients stupidly put the bag in the water. Tea is meant to be made from LOOSE leaves, It tastes far better when made properly with Loose leaves in a pre-warmed Teapot
with water that is the proper temperature based on which type of tea it is, For example I would never make an Oolong hotter than 95c. and Black tea likes to be a little hotter and each kind has its own steaping requirements as well so there is no one size fits all method for the making
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All you need to make it is hot water, which makes it cheaper to prepare than coffee (except instant coffee but nobody wants that). And the bag is compostable, which makes it less wasteful than soda or any other drink that has a can or bottle. Tea is truly the goat
Not to take away your joy, or put too fine of a point on this, but those pyramid bags have plastic in them, and are not only not good for us to pour hot water over, they are not compostable.
In any case, my original point was that tea is more efficient/less wasteful than pretty much any other beverage except tap water, and I don’t think this changes that in any meaningful way
Any product where it feels like you’re indulging in luxury while still not spending any real money gets a pass from me. Shoutout Shin Ramen, I feel like a fancy millionaire because I put an egg in you.
Definitely not nuts! the Kraft cheese square on hot dishes is not only in the ramyun but also in other hot dishes and soups from Korea. (Sorry wanted to step in here to confirm as a person who lived in Korea that they definitely did it/still do it XD)
For the full on billionaire version, it should be romaine. But if you are simply an aspiring millionaire, then iceberg is an excellent choice.
My personal favorite is iceberg. I’m still aspiring I guess.
Those are very good, too. I don't like all the packets that you have to open, and it can be a sloppy mess. The taste is awesome though. Probably my favorite stir fry style instant noodle
I looked at the ingredients list and it does seem to have all the bad stuff in it like monosodium glutamate and stuff that is bad for your heart and vascular system.
Any time I have anything with MSG in it, my blood pressure goes up for a day and a half.
And you don't need to add steamed milk, whipped cream, caramel, chocolate shavings, cinnamon, 1/4 of sugar, etc to make it palatable.
(Full disclosure, i do use sugar in my tea).
I do most of my teas w/o sugar or milk, Pu’er being a favorite, but I do love a slow steeped chai with ingredients hand selected from India with milk, sometimes frothed, and honey or pure maple syrup, just to make a decadent afternoon treat.
Guys! Wake up! The Americans have been trying to discuss tea whilst we've been asleep.... we need to search the thread for any mention of microwaves and chuck the offenders in the tower again...
Upton tea runs articles on the history of tea, which i where i learned the tea used by Lipton, Red Rose, etc is called 'sweepings'. It's what is left after the loose leaf is packaged.
If you have tea strainers or willing to scoop the bags yourself (it's not very much work), then you can even make the pricey stuff at a low price point. I bought loose Fortnum & Mason and the price point per drink is still less than soda or a tea lattes from a cafe.
I spent 21 years in the military and never picked smoking or coffee drinking. I had to bring a thermos of tea for bridge watch since all they had was coffee. I will say coffee smells really good.
I've found someone like me! Hate the taste but appreciate the aroma of coffee. Nothing coffee flavored either - no tiramisu, mocha anything. I drink 2-3 20 ounce teas a day.
I won't blanketly defend tea plantation wages, but tea is potent; you're likely paying several dollars per ounce, you just get 10-15 cups out of it (Western-style brewing).
Looking at my local tea shop, the cheap stuff is still actually $80/lb. The fancy stuff (costing less than $2/cup) is $300/lb.
This is sort of a gonzo comparison, but the most expensive (whole-leaf) tea at my local shop costs a little less than a medium Coke at McDonald's (per drink) and significantly more than importing an A5 Wagyu steak (per ounce).
I'll have the fragrant darjeeling black tea from the foothills of the majestic Himalayas with just a skosh of that mad honey from Nepal. Oh, and with a dusting of cardamom.
I like the earthiness with no sugar. It makes sense that you might like malty and milk.
In the culinary world, we can tell how someone who doesn't know anything about wine would like their preferred wine based on how they like their tea and coffee.
Or you can be like me and pay 10x as much for hand-gathered Himalayan leaves from Rakkasan (seriously that stuff is so good) and be ruined for the other stuff
The Bearded Tea Master nods in quiet approval, stroking his magnificent beard as he watches you steep your humble bag of Earl Grey. ‘Even the simplest leaf,’ he murmurs, ‘can reveal the universe.
It’s a beautiful kettle and it has temp controls to prevent scorching delicate teas - nothing worse than bitter scorched green tea😝. I have a Cuisinart electric kettle and will get the Smeg when it dies. Enjoy!
We bought a glass kettle from Aldi had it for a few years, I love watching the kettle boil, I’m a typical ex Brit (pommie in Australia) but it’s tea for breakfast lunch afternoon tea evening after a walk, or when friends neighbours call, interspersed with a couple of coffees then wine or G&T
I just got a bunch of "high end" tea from Sri Lanka, but none of the bags have strings. I don't know if that's just what the fancy ones do or if it's so low quality they had to cut major corners
I suppose it's a question of sheer volume. Like most people here, I buy tea in boxes of 80 or 160 in some familiar blend, and an hour wouldn't go by without someone making a pot or a mug of cha. Haven't seen proper leaf tea for years, and teabags with string only while abroad. Not that I'm addicted😁
They'll make it in a teapot so bags would get in the way, use a spoon to fish em out after steeping (some Sri Lankan Aunties will squish the tea bags and get all the tannins out for a "strong tea" with milk and sugar but that's too strong for me)
I'm OK, but I was thinking more that there might be 1 site that lists types and prices. I brought home really nice whole leaf tea from a plantation in Kerala when I was on holiday. It was, of course, inexpensive but the quality was A1. Loose tea I've seen since doesn't compare; it's still like dust.
sadly, or happily, the world of tea is incredibly vast, so you'll struggle to find a single site that covers every base. commercial Indian teas are predominantly CTC (small dust-like pellets). for higher quality indian teas of various types and regions, i recall https://ketlee.in being recommended
Cheers, I don't like flavours or anything special; just good old fashioned black breakfast/afternoon tea. But of course I don't want to pay the earth for it either😉. I'll look out that link, ta.
That looks and sounds lovely! For foshou, I think it's closer to the snow pear than the western pears, but I've never had one so I can't say I smell that in foshou. Still love it, though
Indeed. I tried to buy real Lapsang souchong and they didn’t even want to sell it to me. Too rare, she preferred to keep it for herself. It would have been too expensive anyway.
I can't even imagine how much tongmugan jinjunmei (all bud lapsang) would cost, tongmugan lapsang without any buds at all is at least $1/g. It's probably condemned to the same fate as real Laobanzhang, doomed to go stale on some high-up official's shelf...
I see you are more knowledgeable than me. She did brew one small teapot of lapsang and I remember the taste and smell was as complex as a good whiskey.
I don't drink much black tea - for my smoke fix, i opt for tianjian (its much cheaper than lapsang). might be worth a try if you were a fan of the smoky flavour (if yours was smoked? unsmoked lapsang is in, afterall)
Well, there are 77 replies to this post so I doubt that any newbies will get down this far, but—brewing temperature matters with tea, especially the more expensive kinds. So make sure you use the right temperature for the kind of tea you’re making. You may even want to buy a tea thermometer.
thanks for the info. i had no idea. honestly, i accidentally bought loose leaf tea and hadn’t drank it because of the inconvenience of it not being in a bag, but i’m going to boil a pot of water tomorrow evening and find a way to filter it as i don’t have a holder for the leaves. perhaps cheesecloth
Don’t use boiling water. Look up the right temperature of water based on the kind of tea. Otherwise it will be too bitter. You might try brewing it in one container and then decanting the liquid off.
i’ll do that then. thanks. tea seems to be a much less expensive habit than coffee plus much more variety. i want to be a tea person but i’ve always been a coffee person
& it baffles me why restaurants & gas stations can’t buy better quality either! 🤦♀️ 💸 I just ask for hot water & keep those bougie bags in the car 🫖🤓
Raspberry & Rose hip from Sri Lanka, yes please! 🗺️
So good. I drank nothing but Barry's Gold for a few years, but the blend seems (to my taste buds, at least) to have changed and now tastes more like Yorkshire Red blend.
I especially like McEntee's Breakfast and Afternoon blends, but the price is so very not right.
Ditto! I’m so snobby I carry my own loose leaf and infuser/strainer with me. If bagged tea is all that people have experienced, no wonder they don’t like tea.
I'm basic and use tea bags, but I have boxes and boxes in my snack drawers. Being Mexican and being exposed to curanderismo, I have various teas to treat things. I turned myself onto chai tea for pleasure but soon learned it can help with nausea!
The Smith bags are 100% plastic and leach billions of microplastics which cross every known barrier and imbeds themselves in brain, kidney, liver, placental etc parenchyma. Don't do it.
Michelle Francl of Bryn Mawr College as she spills the tea on the rich molecular brew that can be extracted from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant. Register for the webinar
Has anyone tried Pique tea? I keep hearing about it and try to order but abandon my cart every time after seeing the $$$ total. Supposedly from ancient mountains and growing practices.
Lol i think it was japanese tea i was thinking about. Tiny little cups and a whole ritual. I just remember sticker shock at the tea price. Still have some. Im afraid to touch it!
The tiny little cups (and correspondingly small teapot) tend to be Chinese - "gong fu", derived from the brewing of oolong in the south of China and in Taiwan, later expanded to other types, and enmeshed with japanese senchado (those cups are bigger) to create the modern ritual.
Thanks ya i believe after looking at it last night that it is chinese rather than japanese. Pretty sure it came from a chinese shop. The stuff is really very good though...lol wherever its from. You seem to know the ritual i was speaking of though. I am going to refresh myself on it now im curious.
Lol I am not surprised, that's why I mentioned Japanese tea. Japan has a big market for Premium products for premium prices. If it's any consolation, you definitely get what you pay for, so drink your fancy tea and enjoy it. 😂
PG Tips, Tetley's, Yorkshire Tea... whatever your bag, all you need is a mug, boiled water (a kettle to boil it in), a teaspoon.. and milk & sugar if required. That's it. Done.
Here in the UK, a bloody good amount of us drink it a fair bit.
Coffee maybe nice, but it's luck to get right.
I’m not a fan of this new generation of sailing vessels bring back big wooden ships racing each other to be the first to deliver tea as the vehicle of rich person pissing contests
Unless you are new in town and go to Teavana (or whatever it’s called) and they want to charge you $90 for a couple of ounces of tea!!! (I did not buy!!)
i hear ya. i've tried all different types of tea, from gross, cheap lipton all the way up to pretentious loose leaf tea from incredibly bougie tea houses. lately a good middle of the road for me has been yorkshire gold, and not only for the british memelord on youtube. it's just a good cuppa!
And it doesn't make you shudder when it gets cold.. it's just cold tea. Unlike coffee which is horrible once it cools off unless you actually ice it and intentionally make it cold. This is my second tea related reply of the day. I'm rather judgmental about it.
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-sips 4 year old puh’er steeped from an imported dried tea orange-
But coffee is truth and can change your mood from morning blah to facing life. Coffee does something to you that makes you people almost tolerable. ☕️
It's great!!!
I never partook myself but hey to each their own.
https://www.celebstoner.com/blogs/steve-bloom/2022/03/12/jack-kerouac-centennial-on-the-road-stories/
The only thing that irks me about tea is when I find a kind I love and then the company that makes it discontinues it... I'm down to 150g from a Kilo of the kind my wife and I discovered on our honeymoon 12 years back
I even went so far as to hide 50g from myself under my bed in a drawr for 13 years from now when we hit our 25th anniversary.
Sincerely,
Coffee Hater
(Connoisseurs drink it "loose leaf" and the most expensive of these you can get at most places is some version of "monkey picked black". I think my local place had it at $20 for 2 ounces?)
(Most bagged black tea is orange pekoe)
I can't imagine life without one, whether it's electric or an old-fashioned stove top whistling kettle. And I'm not even a tea drinker!
I need a kettle for my cafetière, amongst many other uses.
I’m a tea and coffee nerd. No expensive kettle here. Just regular kettle, but I buy nice teas and locally roasted coffee beans.
In a bag knitted by a seamstress who lives in Copenhagen.
Brewed up in a pot made of semi-precious metal,
Let the blessed contents settle in my very special kettle!"
And I live to drink the pot I make in a lovely cup and saucer too ❤️
But then, sometimes you have to treat yourself.
And the 3 buck tea is better
https://www.ringtons.co.uk
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I just wish there were more tea houses here in Brazil, but I enjoy my own collection.
My personal favorite is iceberg. I’m still aspiring I guess.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/tea-ancient-forest-china
Any time I have anything with MSG in it, my blood pressure goes up for a day and a half.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Bhajan
(Full disclosure, i do use sugar in my tea).
Looking at my local tea shop, the cheap stuff is still actually $80/lb. The fancy stuff (costing less than $2/cup) is $300/lb.
$37? OK, I guess.
I dig gyokuro.
In the culinary world, we can tell how someone who doesn't know anything about wine would like their preferred wine based on how they like their tea and coffee.
Black coffee: bitter, strong= dry red wine.
Coffee is for my Gollum days
How simple and clear can the instructions be?”
https://youtu.be/DTuXBoA688Y
Shudder!
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-shocking-levels-of-microplastics-in-popular-tea-bags/
Coffee: here are a million ways to get it wrong
https://Uptontea.com
Raspberry & Rose hip from Sri Lanka, yes please! 🗺️
I am intrigued
I especially like McEntee's Breakfast and Afternoon blends, but the price is so very not right.
(Smith does make some great tea though)
Do you have his number?
https://www.acs.org/acs-webinars/library/chemistry-of-tea.html
Yes, we’ve all seen THAT video
https://gimmethegoodstuff.org/how-to-avoid-toxins-in-tea/
Here in the UK, a bloody good amount of us drink it a fair bit.
Coffee maybe nice, but it's luck to get right.