Confession: I Hate Tea
Let's be clear. It is a personal mission of mine to woo your inner tea drinker. If you drink more and better tea, there will be more of it available, in more places, at better prices. Good tea will become the norm [muahaha]! The biggest obstacle is this> what passes for "tea" in this country is detestable. Most places serve lousy, unpalatable, stale, bitter, flavorless, or otherwise awful stuff and call it tea, and people think this is all there is. At restaurants, on airplanes, in hotels, the story is the same. I hear people say "I'm not a tea drinker", which to me is like "I'm not an air breather." But who could blame them? How can something so ubiquitous be so unacceptably mediocre?
Pardon my Andy Rooney-like rant; I take issue because there is no substitute for a nice cup of tea, and preparing one couldn't be simpler. With the advent of the many newfangled teabag styles (pyramids, flow-through filters, filterbags, brew-taches, and so on) the barrier of loose leaf tea no longer exists. Whole leaf tea can be had in a teabag, and while whole leaves alone do not a good cup make, they are at least a step in the right direction.
I take issue, too, because tea is so affordable! A pound of tea that costs $20 will make about 200 cups, will last for months, and cost 10ยข for a very nice cup. Most of our gourmet whole leaf teas at Adagio cost less than half of that. A pound of coffee, by comparison, routinely costs more than $10 per lb, will make 45 cups, cost $.27 per 6 brewed oz, and last only a week once it's ground.
Another confession: I rarely measure my tea leaves, take the temp of the water, or time my infusions. Granted, after doing this professionally for almost 15 years, my fingers have a pretty good memory for 2.5 grams, and I can usually auto-pilot a 3 min steep time. But the trick really is in that I buy good tea to begin with. With few exceptions, the better the leaf, the less cautious you need to be to get a good cup. Good teas will forgive you a few minutes of oversteep, a tad too much or too little leaf, 180 degrees versus 195. Of course, these things do matter for peak performance- there is an appreciable difference in a cup prepared with filtered tap water at home and one from the Adagio store with water at perfect mineral balance. And I confess to wishing I'd had a heavier dose of leaf in my Dancong this morning. But I start with good tea especially because I know I can't be trusted to follow instructions at the crack of dawn (and it was still a killer cup of tea).
Even with the poor choices I'm presented, I am still a serial tea drinker. I had the most awful cup of tea on my recent United flight [from a company that rhymes with gigolo], my usual emergency stash packed away in stowage. Experiences like these only bolster my resolve to influence your [tea] drinking habits, and to always keep my travel teabags near and dear.