Is it teatime yet?

Categories: food-and-drink

Tags: tea

Date: 26 July 2006 11:12:02

I decided to write something about tea, it being an important part of life. I offer the following pretty much unedited, despite some misgivings. I was not expecting to find so much to say, neither did I realise how strongly I feel.

Tea

I like tea. Generally, I am quite a tea-snob - give me fair-trade, organic tea with as pretentious a name as possible over your bog-standard cuppa any day. I like Lapsang Souchong, (a smoky tea, as Mr Twinings informs us), although I have yet to find an ethical version of it. Lapsang used to upset my previous work colleagues. They claimed it smelt of bacon, of smoke (well duh) and, on one memorable occasion, of horse lineament. I am not a horsey person, so I cannot vouch for that. I just know that it upset them.

Now fruit teas ARE NOT REAL TEA, I can put it no other way. I seriously object to beverages that smell a million times nicer than they taste. Apple and Cinnamon tea? Why? Have some hot apple juice with some cinnamon in. It will smell the same, and taste much, much nicer. Camomile? Do I look like Peter Rabbit? It smells as bad as it tastes, which, although more honest, is still not a good way to go.

So anyway, a nice Early G would be lovely. Weak and black for me please. If you make it too strong, I will have to put sugar in it which we all know would be a bad idea.

At work there are no nice teas and I have not, as yet, managed to bring in nice tea from home. I am therefore reduced to drinking the rather nasty tea in the kitchen. It is free, so therefore not to be sniffed at (metaphorically speaking, in fact, probably best not to sniff it literally either as it is heading towards the floor-sweepings end of the market).

Work tea, made at the right strength, with the right amount of milk and sugar is not altogether awful. “Hurrah”, I hear you cry, “she has come down off her high horse and is admitting that snobbishness about tea can be overcome with a good cuppa”. Not so fast - there is a problem: I can't make tea the way I like it. My colleagues can make me tea perfectly and, because they are nice people, they frequently do. I can't. They are very polite about my efforts to make tea, but I'm sure the cups I make for them taste as bad as the ones I make for me. What can I do? How can it be so difficult? Teabag in, sugar, hot water, milk, teabag out is my general method, but it doesn't seem to work.

I enlisted the help of a colleague to find out what sort of tea I like - she says, after much experimentation, that I like very little milk, a little sugar and not too strong. Well, that is pretty much what I thought. She really couldn't help much more than that.

For the summer I have resorted to making fruit squash for me when I do a round of drinks. I hope they haven't noticed that I am still inflicting my tea on them, while escaping into the land of Orange and Barley (not to be confused with the Land of Green Ginger which is another thing altogether).

Right, I'm off for a coffee. :-)