Today's post comes courtesy of a friend who is just getting into tea drinking. He received the DAVIDsTEA Starter Kit for Christmas, and decided to start on drinking tea. I'm excited to see what he thinks!
I'll let him explain the rest to you....
An Unexpected Journey
Hi Tea Friends!
I am The T’Noob.
Like the name suggests, I’m just starting my adventure into the wide and wild world of loose leaf tea drinking. I was inspired in no small part by my good friend and our gracious bloggess Steph and a few other newly minted “Tea Snobs” I work with.
I’ll be honest with you. This is likely to be an uphill battle. For me tea has always been that drink that Mom would make me drink when my nose got stuffy or my throat a little scratchy and even then under protest and only with so much sugar or honey in it it may as well be pop. I find coffee a repulsive assault on the senses. Even hot chocolate needs to be sold to me even on a cold winter day. Hot beverages, in the past, have never really been my thing safe to say. What’s more I am a super taster. Even the smallest of doses of capsaicin drive me to tears and causes subtler notes to be lost amongst more dominant ones in less spicy fare. When I was deciding on my nom de plume I initially considered “The Reluctant Tea Man”, but thought it was too wordy and a little defeatist.
Why bother then, you ask? Well a good bit of it was, like I said, inspired by Mrs. Steph and the joys of tea drinking she has shared (along with a lovely Christmas present). Looking to expand my horizons play no small part in my taking this leap into the strange and the unknown. Little steps after all. My contributions to this blog can be seen as a journal in the conversion (or failure to do so) to the Tao of Tea. I anticipate that my contributions are going to be long on opinion and relation of experience and short on the science and art of tea, but may be insightful nonetheless I hope.
Anywhoodle. Like I said I had received a “David’s Starter Kit” from Mrs. Steph for Christmas this year and so that’s where I’ll start. I decided to be somewhat tentative with my first step and started with “David’s Organic Breakfast”, which struck me as the most conventional and conservative of the five provided in the kit.
So I boiled up some filtered water, filled the provided steeping pouches with the prescribed tablespoon and a quarter (maybe a pinch more) and gave it a good six minute steep as per the instructions on the package, which had called for four to six minutes. The result was a cup of nice red coloured tea and it certainly smelled the part.
As for taste?
Yeaaaaah... It was just tea to me with all the same old complaints I’m afraid. Bitter and astringent, almost to the point of feeling like I needed to take a sip of water to rehydrate my mouth tissues after every tip of the cup. I’m sure there are notes and flavours in there but I just couldn’t appreciate them. So in went a couple solid dollops of liquid honey with a few seconds of stirring to make sure every corner was sweetened up to suit. But then I was more or less just drinking honey water with the tea being a distinct afterthought. I finished the cup and it was nice, but it really wasn’t tea anymore. It was just hot, thin honey.
Not the most auspicious start, I’m afraid. I’m willing to concede that I may have screwed up making it, but I made a point of trying to follow the directions as per the packaging. I didn’t have a thermometer to know exactly the temperature of the water but I did give it a few seconds after coming off the roiling boil before pouring so it should have been within shouting distance of the proscribed 98 degrees and I went so far as to use the stopwatch on my smartphone to make sure I didn’t over steep it. I don’t see a lot of room to mess up in there but I do have a certain talent for fouling up simple things.
Lessons Learned:
1) Use a smaller cup. The cup I used was pretty large and I fear that I may have diluted the result too far, leaving the more pleasant undertones too weak to compete against the stronger bitterness and fermented astringency.
2) No guts, no glory. I think that in my caution I may have mistakenly fled to familiarity rather than picking a test subject that might better fit my finicky tastes.
Will I try the “Organic Breakfast” again? Sure. I’m not willing to quit on it yet, but must admit that I will remain sceptical and certainly not try it again right away.
So where to from here? I’m thinking of “Chocolate Rocket” next. I hope that taking a leap into unconventional will take me away from the less than desirable aspects of that conventionality. Wish me luck. :)
Cheers!
The T’Noob
I hope he likes Chocolate Rocket, because it's one of my favourites!
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