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.

Once again, Mei Leaf comes to the rescue for my tea exploration. Today we have supermarket teas from Croatia. The sample teas are gunpowder green, 1st flush Darjeeling, and a cooked pu erh that was made incorrectly with a lot of shortcuts. Keep in mind, this is the "high end" loose leaf from supermarkets. I guess their "high end" supermarket teas are rather equivalent to the ones we get around here. For a bit more about Croatia , they are located in the northwest part of the Balkan peninsula. The are next to Slovenia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Bosnia Herzegovina. They have a very long, narrow strip of  land along the Adriatic sea, and a tiny strip of their border touches Montenegro. The southern tip of croatia is separated from the rest of the country by a small bit of Bosnia Herzegovina that also touches the Adriatic sea. They were part of Yugoslavia for much of the 20th century, which broke up into separate countries in the 1990s. Hmm, this is a theme throughout...

The main thing that I remember about Luxembourg is that it is a country that borders France. I had to know that in my 8th grade French class, and it is one of the few things I haven't forgotten. The length of the country is sandwiched between Belgium and Germany, while the narrow side of the country shares a border with northern France. Most of their population lives in urban areas, and they have a high rate of inbound immigration (to make up for the low birth rate). They are a highly adaptable country. In the 1960's their prosperity came from steel exports. As times have changed, so have they, first transitioning to banking and now IT and economic commerce form the backbone of their economy. This flexibility has made Luxembourg one of the countries with the highest standard of living and per capita income. Give me a moment to fantasize about living somewhere so forward thinking. Luxembourg City is also one of the capitals of the EU, and they house the European Court of Justi...

Romania , the land of Transylvania, and stories of vampires (based on Romanian ballads and folklore). There is a lot more to Romania than these stories, of course. From 1948 to 1989 they were part of the U.S.S.R. Their first free elections were held in 1990, and in 2004 they joined NATO, and in 2007 they joined the EU. Here I am feeling old again because I remember when the U.S.S.R. was still a thing. They are a country in the southeast portion of Europe with a small border on the black sea. They have 4 distinct seasons, and the land is described as being 1/3 mountains, 1/3 forests, and 1/3 plains and hills. The people of Romania are said to have descended from the Romans, and they have been though many changes over time. I find interesting that they once used the Cyrillic alphabet, and switched to the Latin alphabet when academics started studying in other parts of Europe, especially France. My tea research on Romania started off pretty boring. I found ads for Lipton tea. I also fou...