Camellia Sinensis: All About Tea

A few of my favorite things to say about tea:

All teas come from the same plant. Blacks are oxidized longer than greens and oolongs are in between. Herbal teas aren't technically tea.

Tea is naturally high in fluoride and Vitamin C. It contains caffeine, a bit less but the same caffeine as coffee. Though tea also contains a natural chemical that slows the speed that our bodies metabolize the caffeine. This is why we crash off coffee but tea holds us until the early afternoon.

It's not good to use tea balls because the leaves need to unfurl. As in it goes from this (imagine my thumb and pointer close together) to this (wide open, like five or six times bigger). I use a 4 cup tea pot with a deep wire basket as seen here on my cast iron cooking post.

I heard that if you switch from coffee to tea and change nothing else about your diet, you will lose an average of 10 pounds! I don't know if this is true for a fact. Nonetheless, it's part of my tea spiel.

I love tea to an extreme (can you tell?!). I drink it every day in the morning and again in the afternoon if I'm lucky. I talk about tea a lot. I give tea to people disguised as gifts to propagate potential tea enthusiasts. I buy all my tea loose in 4 oz. pouches from Teasource, a Twin Cities based tea store that has an incredible catalog and delivers to my door no longer than two days from my online order.

Today, I drank four pots of tea (and counting) and spent the day practicing use of the manual settings on my new digital camera. Along the way taking photos of my beloved energy source. Yes, I'm kinda tripping out on tea right now (and I like it). This is how I party now that I'm in my 30s.

Once used tea leaves. These are ready for another couple of pour overs. The next two pots will have less caffeine than the first, but the flavor remains.

Unused teas on left, waiting to unfurl.


Today's picks:
Green tea with Mandarin Orange

Moroccan Mint

Tung Ting Oolong

Gunpowder Temple of Heaven

I love to observe the differences in types of tea based on how they were dried and processed and flavored in some cases, with the touch of people that have hand rolled the leaves in the manner specific to each type. It's a very beautiful thing.

Interested in making the jump from coffee to tea? I did! Give me the word and I'll send you a sample.

Enjoy your day and thanks for checking out my blog!