Students: Time to Study, A Great Time for Tea

Students everywhere are getting ready to take finals over the next few weeks, and whether your class is project based, or if you're dreading the comprehensive final, tea can help you stay up late, get to bed earlier, focus, or relax. Here are my recommendations for students based on their situations.

The 'all nighter' tea: Really any black tea will be about the same any of these would be a good choice. But as much as it pains me to say it, you might end up needing to switch to coffee as the night wears on.

The 'SoNervousICan'tSleep!!!' tea: chamomile is the drug for you. This flowering plant will ease your anxiety and put you right to sleep.

The 'I need a break, but I need to come back' tea: Spring Cherry Green is a fabulous break tea for those who need to stay focused, and get back to work after their afternoon drink.

The 'I need a break, and I'm done for today' tea: I recommend peppermint tea to anyone looking to completely shrug off the hard days work, and wind down for the evening. Chamomile is an alternate here, but if you don't want to sleep quite yet, I'd go with peppermint.

The 'one down, two to go' tea: celebrate, relax, and recoup with a twist on a classic, the earl gray white is a great choice to keep your focus, and save your from burnout. This will feel similar to the Spring Cherry Green, but this emotion is similar to needing a short break.

The 'morning of the test' tea: in test taking consistency is king, stick with the classic earl grey black.

The 'I'M DONE!": congratulations, try one of these!

Cheers-
Teb

Two Cups and an Herbal.

I'm officially addicted. I can neither wake up, nor get to sleep without tea. 'Nuff said.

Cheers-
Teb

P.S. it being crunch time (of the semester) doesn't help.

I Feel Like

This.

The Onion does a great job satirizing the stereotypical tea drinker. I can't help but imagine myself in a pink bonnet with teddy bears throwing a tea party with tea made from 'pretty flowers'. But for many the high class aspect of tea is very appealing, particularly compared to the incredibly common, and hence mundane, coffee. Because tea is not incredibly ubiquitous in American society the 'classy' and 'British' stereotype is a draw for those looking to try something new, I know it was a pull for me, and it shows in my sign out.

Cheers-
Teb.

Just in time for cold weather: I love iced tea!

For someone living in Salt Lake City this post is totally out of season, but I've been drinking a lot of iced tea even as the seasons change and winter starts to arrive. Part of the appeal of iced tea for me is that it seems to go better with lunch and dinner meals then hot tea. I really can't explain why I don't like drinking hot drinks with my lunch or dinner, but love hot drinks late at night by themselves, or with desert, or at midday with crackers and cheese, but thats the way I am.

Iced tea can be brewed just the same as regular tea, then left too cool, or effectively watered down by adding the ice while the tea is still piping hot. Many iced tea brewers, though, will use the power of the sun to brew their tea, which allows you to make bigger batches, and an easier environment for experimentation with the flavor of your tea.

Whichever way you decide upon, iced tea is a great way to get your tea on in the hotter weather, or when you just don't want a hot drink.

Cheers -
Teb

Why I Drink 2: Flavor

The flavor of tea is obviously a huge factor in why anyone drinks, or doesn't drink, a specific tea but with such a wide swath of teas to choose from there is a flavor for nearly every pallet. Even without herbal teas we can find a huge variety within the true tea family, especially if we include flavored teas.

Black tea: dark and full bodied, black tea is an excellent breakfast drink. It tends to go nicely with eggs, bacon, and toast. A particularly popular version of this tea is Earl Grey which is black tea leaves and bergamot root. Black teas tend to go well with sugar and milk, but my personal favorite additions to a good black tea are lemon and honey.

Green tea: tends to be more bitter then black tea, and slightly lighter in flavor. A really good unflavored green tea should be drunk by itself, but depending on the addition flavors honey or sugar can make a good addition. Flavored green teas tend to reduce the bitterness of the tea by adding dried fruits and flowers and encouraging the addition of sugar or honey.

White tea: much lighter then either green or black tea, these teas are very often flavored because of how light the flavor of the tea is. These whimsical teas are usually excellent by themselves, and light enough not to need sugar or honey, because the flavor of the other ingredients shines through. A white Earl Grey might contain bergamot as well as vanilla to complement the light flavor.

Herbals: this category encompasses way too much to generalize about the flavors. From chamomile to peppermint, pine to citrus to African Rooibos. Just find one that smells appealing, and odds are it will taste just as appealing.

Cheers-
Teb

Tea, Disease, and H1N1

For ages people have been drinking tea to empower them during an illness. Not only does the caffeine help fight headaches, and give you the willpower to keep on keeping on, but many teas also have high antioxidant levels, and white tea has been shown to have antibacterial effects as well as be effective in preventing cancer. The heat of the tea can also help to open your airways, as well as soothe your throat as the drink coats it. Finally, herbal teas (without the caffeine diuretic) can help keep you hydrated.

But besides these normal effects, tea can be particularly effective in battling the biggest new flu on the block (swine flu/H1N1) . Because the H1N1 virus cannot live in your stomach, and because it often lives in your throat, gargling with warm salt water, or drinking hot drinks like tea can help loosen the mucus in your throat, and send the infected cells down to the uninhabitable stomach, helping keep your system swine flu free.

Cheers -
Teb

I Say Herbal You Say No Thanks

The title refers to this video . In honesty I disagree with this take on herbal tea, but unlike tea made from the tea tree I mostly enjoy herbal teas at night. The obvious reason for this is that tea is caffeinated and drinking caffeine right before you want to fall asleep tends not to work out for me.

Herbal teas can be made from a huge variety of plants, so vast that saying 'herbal tea' is close to saying 'a hot drink made by bathing some sort of leaves in water'. Some of the more popular herbal teas include chamomile, made from the chamomile flower, native to Egypt; Peppermint tea, made from peppermint leaves; Red teas are technically herbal as they are not made from the tea tree plant. There are thousands of others, and in fact making your own herbal tea is fairly easy!

So this MC may not love his herbal tea, but give me a chamomile late at night and I'll say "yes please"

Cheers - Teb

Why I Drink 1: Caffeine

This is to be the first post of a recurring theme here at the TTB: why I drink tea. I'm covering Caffeine first because its a big part of a lot of people's lives. Caffeine is a staple in both of the big morning drinks (the other being coffee), as well as in soda drinks. So what draws us to this particular chemical?

Caffeine can be found naturally in coffee, tea, guarana and various other plants. Discovered originally by a German chemist, Friedrich Ferdinand Runge, it acts as a natural pesticide in plants. Human consumption of caffeine, however, dates back much further then this.

Caffeine in mild doses has a fairly wide variety of effects including increase alertness, and increased tolerance for labor (mental and physical) , and decreased drowsiness. Its easy to see with these effects why beverages which have caffeine naturally would be popular in breakfast drinks.

Cheers - Teb

The Mug Matters

I've noticed recently in my tea consumption that the device from which I drink can have a huge impact on my overall experience. I have one cup that I really like, but there are a few mugs in my house that I use, but end up enjoying my brew noticeably less. I think this is mostly a visual phenomenon, all of the cups I don't like have colored interiors, as opposed to the white ones on the mugs I do like. I like to see the color of the tea when I'm drinking, be it amber, green, yellow, or what have you, seeing the beverage as the color it actually is makes a difference. This really hit me when I bought a tea thermos because I could no longer see the liquid at all as I drank. Its incredibly convenient, but it's just strange at the same time.

Cheers - Tyler

Dig This Green Tea Recently

I woke up at 11:00 today in desperate need of caffeine, and the tin which holds my strongest black tea has been empty for the last week, so I grabbed my strongest green tea instead, which has really been habit since the black ran out. It got me thinking about the difference between the four main flavors of tea - white, black, green, oolong - here is what I learned:

These four kinds of tea are from the same plant - Camellia sinensis. The difference is how they are processed. The two major factors are letting the leaves wilt, and letting the leaves oxidize, it breaks down like this:

Green - wilted and unoxidized
Black - wilted and fully oxidized
White - unwilted and unoxidized
Oolong - wilted and partially oxidized

Both the wilting and oxidizing process will happen naturally after the leaves are picked. Wilting happens first and after the leaves have wilted they begin to oxidize. These processes can be stopped by drying the leaves, this means that white teas are dried earlier then other teas, and black teas are dried after the longest amount of time.

The two most commonly consumed teas are green and black, and there has been a good deal of research into the health benefits of tea with green usually beating out black in overall health benefits, because it is less decayed and thus has more of the anti-oxidant found in tea. This means of the major teas white is the healthiest, black should be the least beneficial to your health. However more recent research suggests that the more fermented/wilted/oxidized tea has different health benefits, but some that are equally powerful, because of a substance called Theaflavin & Thearubigins.

So regardless of what kind of tea you choose, take solace that it is doing your body good!

Cheers - Tyler

An Introduction to the Quest

I already drink tea. I already enjoy tea. I have a cup in the morning, and a cup at night. Sometimes I have a cup at midday. I can tell you if I like a tea, or if I don't like a tea. I can tell you that Lipton tea is not so good, and that Tzao tea is better. If you lived in Salt Lake I could recommend you to a variety of good tea shops. But with all this tea drinking I could not claim to be a tea connoisseur. I do not know what makes some teas better or worse then others; I know very little about the process by which tea is made; I know even less about how to best unlock the flavors of any given tea. I know that there are black, white, and green teas, but not what makes them different, or what makes them all tea.

The point of my Quest is to learn what I don't know about tea. This blog will catalog my new found knowledge. It will be about tasting and sampling, it will be about history, it will be delicious, and it will be a good source of anti-oxidants. As you glean from what I have learned I hope we will both better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the finest of hot beverages.