Global Tea Time

Thanks to a friend, we're heading back to Sri Lanka today. Life has been really hectic for the last couple of weeks, and promises to keep being a royal pain for a while, so I invited a friend over for tea. It's nice to be able to vent sometimes, and look for new ideas on how to deal with the crap life hands to you. Anyway, she brought me a box of tea that she got in her "World Box" subscription. I'm not familiar with this brand of tea, but upscale bagged teas are usually pretty good. As you can see from the label, this is matcha with cinnamon and ginger. I tore open a bag, and took a sniff. The scent of ginger wafted out with a hint of cinnamon. This is a promising start. Then I brewed myself a cup. This is the first bagged tea I've tasted that has ever gotten the cinnamon right! The cinnamon isn't strong, and bitter like it is in most bagged teas. It is a mellow, soft cinnamon flavor like you get when using a real cinnamon stick. There is the pe...

Great Britain (or the United Kingdom) comprises a combination of England, Whales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The ins and outs of the structure and politics of the UK are beyond me. Whenever I think of the UK, I remember a comment from an episode of " My Word! " that played on NPR when I was in college. At the end of the show, the panelists were given a phrase, and they had to make up a story around it. Those stories were often pun filled flights of imagination, but I always remembered one panelist described the island of Great Britain as "looking like a chap wearing a big hat riding a pig backwards". I looked up a picture of the island, and I saw what he was talking about. I decided to look up tea in Scotland today, and found that they do feel compelled to share their tea culture online in a meaningful way. There is actually a tea garden in Scotland where they make artisnal black teas.  Scotland comprises about 1/3 of the island of Great Britain, and ...

British tea has a reputation for snacks and ceremony.. Today, we're taking a look at these British tea times with an article from NPR . First up is elevenses. I've heard reference to this in British TV shows. Apparently it's also known as the hobbit's third meal. I'll admit, I never really got into all of the stories about hobbits aside from listening to my 5th grade teacher recite "The Hobbit".(as an aside, people who are into the hobbit stories are really impressed by my teacher being able to recite the story for the class). Back to tea, apparently elevenses is a 20th century construct. Basically, it seems to be tea and cookies (as spoken by someone who rarely eats cookies). I'll take the tea thank you. Next up is afternoon tea. This emerged as a social event in the 1830's or 40's. A member of queen Victoria's court, Anna Maria Russel, duchess of Bedford, is credited with starting afternoon tea. This was usually had around 3 or 4 in t...

I wasn't sure how to approach British tea. They are the country responsible for bringing tea to India, East Africa, and ultimately the world. They are also responsible for the rise in popularity of coffee in this country after they started a little spat with the colonists over the taxation of tea. My first musings about British tea started with the GastroPod podcast talking all about tea in Britain and India . In it, they talk about why the Brits only drink black tea. The story goes that the Chinese believed that the British wanted their green tea to be bright green, so they were adding green dye. When an explorer (or spy, I'm not sure since tea making was a secret, and the Brits were working on stealing tea to grow elsewhere) discovered this, he alerted people not to drink green tea. Black tea became the default because it was considered safe. Why would green dye in tea be so controversial? I'll let Caitlin tell you.