Category Archives: tea

About my beverage of choice

best of 2009: Tea!!!

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

Today’s topic might have been written for me: December 16 — Tea of the year. I can taste my favorite tea right now. What’s yours?

I’m a tea person, meaning I drink tea, lots and lots of tea. I drink it daily, all day long, mostly blacks, but there are times for greens, whites, and oolongs, too. I steep pots of tea for the office. Others share in, and when I’m out, some of the crew doesn’t even try to steep their own. My twitter bio includes the phrase “crazy cat and tea lady”. When I host gatherings at home, everyone knows that there will be freshly steeped pots of tea ready. I have shelves set up in my living room to hold most (but not all) of my tea paraphernalia:

I’m not an expert about tea but I know more than the average joe.

But thinking of the best tea of the year? Hmm, I almost want to say: All of them! But no, that’s not right. There have definitely been some pots I’d call sub-par. Still, the rest were just dandy. So my best tea is: yunnan and keemun which I’ve loved since college and a lovely sencha I steep on weekends and the old, nearly empty tin of Kashmiri chai that’s full of cardamom and the Earl Grey I made a few days ago that reminded me that sometimes I still like Earl Grey and the vanilla tea I brew for my friend on weekends, plus the Ceylon OPA that I buy in bulk at a local Indian market. Oh, also the Turkish tea I bought at the same market that my friend doesn’t like at all, but I do, more and more. And though they’re, strictly speaking, not real tea, there’s also the lavender I brew late at night sometimes and the barley tea that my favorite Japanese restaurant serves as house tea.

Ummm, tea!