A Personal Evolution of Tea

My first experience with tea was freshman year of college, and involved me drinking a cup of herbal something-or-other one of the girls on my floor had made. My reaction was that the slightly flavored water wasn't bad but was nothing special. My indifference remained until I spent a term studying in London. My term had ended, the other students in the program had mostly departed, and I had a week to kill waiting for some friends to disentangle themselves from the shackles of finals and family Thanksgivings to come visit me.

Unfortuneately my wallet's health was inversely related to the amount of my free time, and I found myself in one of the most expensive cities on the planet with nothing to do and no money to do it with. I began taking long walks through the city, tried to intuit the rules of cricket from watching a severly edited test match on tv, and investigated the several packets of tea that accompanied the electric kettle in my room. I found this tea (a standard Earl Grey) to be more flavorful than the tinted water I remembered, and my opinion of tea began to improve. My interest rose again when I read Douglas Adams' description of how to make the perfect cup of tea in his posthumous novel The Salmon of Doubt. The key: boiling water, which would bring out the full flavor of the tea. I began drinking bagged tea regularily, and then last year I received (from my girlfriend Kathreen) a teapot and several canisters of Twinings loose leaf tea for Christmas. The Earl Grey, which has a distinctive scent, smelled and tasted better than the bagged variety, but was clearly the same tea.

This was all well and good, until a month ago when Kathreen and I ran out of Earl Grey. It was not an immediate problem, because we had other kinds of tea, but it needed to be replaced. As Kathreen wanted some loose Ceylon (which we could not find locally), she looked online to see if we could order it there. She found a site called Adagio (pssst-it's linked on the site of the site), and decided to try their teas. What arrived was a pound of Earl Grey, a pound of Ceylon, and 8 ounces of their Yunan Gold blend (that's a lot of tea). When I opened the Earl Grey, I found it to be even more pungent than usual, with more depth to the scent than was to be had from a tin of Twinings. As I tried the first cup out of the pot, I was shocked to discover that it tasted almost nothing like the Earl Grey I had been drinking for the past two years! After drinking it for two weeks now, I realize that the taste is similar, only with more subtlety and depth. Somewhat like comparing a blended Scotch to a single malt. The site's promotional material proclaimed that their teas were not only fresher, but also harvested by hand, making them of higher quality than teas collected by less discriminating threshers. I can only assume that this is the difference I taste.

So that's where I'm at right now with tea. I suggest that if you drink tea, to give Adagio (or any one of the other high-quality tea sites you can find) a try and see if you find a similar improvement in your tea.