An Exploration Of Tea

The past couple weeks I've been on a tea discovery journey of sorts. First some history. I've never really been all that crazy about tea since I'm really sensitive to bitterness (coffee falls into this same category too) and straight black tea is a  little too much for me to take. But eventually I stumbled onto white tea via Snapple and found that tea didn't have to be overwhelmingly strong (for me anyway). From there I experimented a bit and found that I also enjoy green tea as well. It's a little stronger than white, but not anything like black tea. All of this was bottled, prebrewed iced teas. I still was not a fan of hot tea.

A couple weeks ago, some comments from a friend (Wassy if you want to be specific about it) gave me the idea to get myself an automatic iced tea maker. I had been drinking a lot of iced tea (bottled) and realized that I could probably spend a lot less on tea than I was if I made it myself and store bought teas have a lot of gunk in there other than the actual tea. The automatic way was good because of the convenience factor. So I decided to give it a try and bought myself a Hamilton Beach iced tea maker.

At first I tried a bunch of the green teas that I purchased from the supermarket in there, trying to find something that I would like. They all came out tasting sorta strange to me and not like something I'd drink regularly. Eventually I decided that I'd try loose leaf teas and found my way over to Adagio Teas which seemed to be highly recommended around the internet. I purchased their green tea sampler, as well as a sample tin of Vanilla Green to try out. When they arrived the next day (fast shipping) I went to work.

I tried the vanilla green tea first, which produced some very nice results…at first. I thought I had finally found a tea that I could enjoy iced, however the next day my pitcher of tea became very…not so good. After checking around on the internet, it seems that this kind of thing is common when trying to ice green teas and since I'm sensitive to the taste, it wasn't going to work out real well for me. I gave up on that and decided to try white tea, as well as trying to drink the green teas I bought warm.

Back to Adagio I went and bought myself some Silver Needle white tea and an IngenuiTEA Teapot so I could actually use my loose leaf tea warm. When that arrived I realized I had found my solution. The vanilla green tea was really good hot, and now I'm drinking that as an alternative to my hot chocolate addiction. And, as it turns out, the white tea is perfect iced. So now I have the best of both worlds and my conversion to a tea drinker is complete.

My tea obsession has lead me to wonder: who figured out that if you pour boiling water over these leaves, you get something that's pretty tasty? That must have been one crazy guy.

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