Tea, Anyone?

The tea I'm most familiar with is cut black tea.  This is often put into tea bags, and you can make either hot tea with it, or iced tea.  Hot tea is lightened with a little milk, or just drunk plain, sometimes with sugar (or sweetener); it's the same with ice tea.

When I was in high school, I was introduced to tea.  I drank gallons of the stuff--- not all at one sitting, but over the years.  I gave up tea in favor of coffee while at university, and even while I taught, because that's what was available.  But every once in a while, I get a hankering for tea. Not just any tea, but good tea. 

Tea has four aspects: fragrance, taste, tartness, and color.  Fragrance and taste are self explanatory.  Tartness is, too; but I think it might be different than the tartness of an apple, for instance, which is related to sourness as well.

Color is the least important, but for those who drink tea with milk, it becomes important as a means for judging the milk/ tea balance.  (I'm sure there are those who will ascribe a mystical flavor element to color as well, and I'm not going to argue with that.)

Teas that are grown in the highlands of Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Kenya, at higher than two thousand feet (I'm not sure of the exact altitude) is fragrant, but lacking in color, taste and tartness.  Tea grown at lower altitudes are considered to have a more robust fragrance, and more color and tartness.  Connoisseurs don't like the robust fragrance.  Tea grown at a few hundred feet has an even coarser fragrance and color and tartness, but they are favored in places where the tea is spiced with coriander and cardamom.

Most tea drinkers, especially in Britain, like consistent cups of tea, which have a fair fragrance, tartness, taste and color, consistently cup after cup.  This is achieved by blending tea; high- grown and mid- grown, and with teas from different plantations together.  Tea from Lipton's and other old firms, are made this way.  The bulk of tea sold in the US is blended tea.

Recently, I'm having difficulty finding a variety of tea that tastes right to me.  In one sense, being a (mostly) natural product, we can't expect it to be absolutely consistent from one cup of tea to the next.  Further, I'm getting older, and my taste-buds don't seem to know what they're doing!

While I was living with my parents, I seldom drank tea; then at my ɓoarding school, we drank tea every day in the morning (if we wanted to), and it was sort of unremarkable stuff.  Then, once I got taken out of that school and made to attend a school in the hills, in 11th grade, we were allowed to leave the school compound during free periods.  My friends, as part of my cultural education, took me to Hotel Silverdale, a restaurant on Brownrigg Street. As a law-abiding citizen, I was extremely anxious.  We went upstairs, and they ordered a pot of tea.  (This seemed quite harmless, and my heartbeat slowed down.)

A pot of tea, and a small pitcher of warmed fresh milk was brought out; everyone served themselves, and–with some help–I began sipping my very first cup of tea that I was drinking voluntarily.  I needed six spoonfuls of sugar (I know, I know; my health deteriorated as you would expect), but the tea was heavenly.  I frequented Hotel Silverdale so much that I was in fear of being sold shares in the ownership!  Jk.

To explain to an expert what kind of tea I would like, I will have to get into the subject of tea in greater depth.  But I'm retired, and unwilling to exert myself so much.  I have three types of tea I drink in rotation, and the one that satisfies me most is PG Tips (the fine print says Unilever.)

In the USA, unfortunately, the common drink—in these parts, anyway; in the south it might be different—is coffee.  By the time I had left university, and was becoming curious about what sort of tea I could get, it was 1983, and I was fearsome about returning to the motherland, especially since no post was waiting for me, and many of my friends who had returned to Ceylon were re-returning here.  When I finally visited Sri Lanka, it was 1997.  Nobody there could steer me towards a reliably good brand of tea, while I was in Colombo.  When I returned, I brought with me some Lipton's yellow- label tea.  The next visit to Sri Lanka, I discovered Bogawantalawa tea, which I really like, and brought back several bags of the stuff to distribute among my tea-deprived ex-pats.  I drank tea from that bag until it was over, and asked my daughter to return the bag I had given her (which she hadn't used, but she's an American, despite her parentage) and drank that until it was gone.  A friend, a Trinitian, brought me Loolecondera tea, which was excellent.  This time, when I was flying back, the young lady at the duty-free tea store listened to my story, and insisted that that Loolecondera tea (what an outlandish name!  Certainly not Sinhala) was too strong.  "Too strong, sir!"  So I bought the type she recommended, but, to cover my bases, also bought a tiny tin of Lool… that thing.  It is too strong, though I had been enjoying it for a year. 

I feel a lot better now, having complained to you chaps.  Any advice will be cheerfully read and appreciated, but bear in mind that Sri Lankan tea is about $5 an ounce in the USA, I think, which does not encourage experimentation.

Anyway, there's always PG Tips to fall back on, though some importer is probably making a killing at the cost of some Sri Lankan exporter.

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