Global Tea Time

Today I bloom my 3rd tea. Well, actually I bloomed it last night. I gave up on trying the tea because it is really bad, but the show is fun, so why not bloom it in the evening since I don't have to worry about caffeine keeping me up all night? The down side of working first shift is that I usually only get to use my special brewing methods on the weekend (unless I feel like dragging more teaware to work (I do sometimes), but I don't take tea pets, and I don't take pictures of my brews because I'm already weird enough to my much younger office mates. So, here's where my tea started out. The bag says it is cranberry flavored. I did not smell cranberry at any time while brewing this tea. It's fun to watch them unfurl. The yellow spot showed up moments before I could take the picture. At first I was thinking of it as a bloodshot eye slowly opening. This was another very vertical tea creation. I don't have a clear, non-textured vase to bloom these in, although ...

Since I like my dark puerh teas, I decided to give the green loose leaf puerh a try. The description listed it as a lightly smoked tea, but I would say that it has more of a medium smoke. As you can see, these are larger leaves, and the green color is still visible in spite of being smoked. I can tolerate the smoke in the green puerh, but it does not wash out with multiple brewings. I find that shorter brew times are better. This tea brews at a temperature cooler than a black tea, but hotter than green tea at 195 degrees. My water kettle doesn't have a 195 degree button, so I warm the water to 200 figuring that it will cool down a bit as I pour. Here I'm brewing this with my gaiwan, and my newest tea pet rabbit. Now I need a good Japanese rabbit name... As you can see, I started this post a bit ago. That lace I show in progress by my tea box was finished and exchanged for a new piece of lace weeks ago. Oh well. That's how life goes sometimes. This is a tea I drink occasi...

I took a couple of days off work because I have a bunch of vacation hours. Something about being in a pandemic, and the fact that I am terrible at planning trips means I don't take much time off. In reality, I find travelling alone to be a major hassle, and I'd rather just stay home when I have time off. That said, I do enjoy taking some local road trips with my days off. I also know if I go to my favorite tea house on a weekday afternoon I have a pretty good chance of getting the tatami room. There's a lot of competition for it, especially since they can only have one table back there now (pre-plague there were 4). I think it's the only tatami room in the Midwest, I've searched online and that's pretty much the only thing that comes up. For a while I was the only person in the place. When I was getting closer to leave, a bunch of people wearing scrubs all came in for some tea. A nurse I worked with who used to live in that city talked about how she and her co...

I've been meaning to do a post about this new tea flavor for a while. This is a fruity black tea. I'll admit that I like fruity green teas better, but there are a few fruity black teas I like (like peach ginger black tea). This was the tea my friend tried at the tea shop. It smelled so good I decided to get a bag to try. Also, I tend to get teas that evoke summer in the late fall/early winter. In fact, this year I debated getting a bag of jasmine green tea just so I could have a floral tea for winter. Before I got too carried away, I got Darjeeling instead because it has floral notes without feeling like I'm drinking perfume. There's no specific fruit this is supposed to be flavored like. There is a generic fruity scent when you open the bag, and there are little colored bits interspersed with the black tea leaves. I cheated and used a wire strainer basket to brew this instead of the ceramic one since the leaves are so fine. The tea has a pleasant fruity taste for t...