Notes and Errata of Mark of the Asphodel

All right.  Since everyone else is talking about tea...

I love tea.  I've been into it since my senior year of high school or thereabouts, before green tea and white tea became trendy antioxidant additives to everything.  I've had literally hundreds of tea varieties pass in and out of my kitchen, and at present I have several dozen tea types on handing, ranging from staples like Yunnan and Assam to rare and delicate things like "White Egret Pearls" and Himalayan Hand-rolled Black.

I know my tea.  I can often tell the origin by tasting it.  Yes, you can tell Chinese Black from Indian Black, or Chinese Green from Japanese Green, by taste alone.  In some cases it's quite easy.

Let's get one thing straight, though-- tea, real tea, is the leaf of the Camellia sinensis plant.  That's it.  No chamomile, or rooibos, or stevia, or any of that shit.  They may have their uses, but it's not tea.  Celestial Seasonings?  Either not-tea, or minuscule quantities of tea covered by orange peel and hibiscus and licorice root.  Again, drink it if you really like that, but it's not really tea.  Would you call a drink "coffee" if it consisted of things swept up from Juan Valdez's burro stable mixed with roasted carrot root and Hershey's syrup?  Really?

There are four main types of tea:

Black tea, called "hong cha" or "red tea" by the Chinese.  The leaves are oxidized and the caffeine levels are higher (but nowhere close to coffee).  Use boiling water to steep it.  It usually lasts a couple of years on the shelf.  Types of black tea range from the beautiful full-leaf Chinese varieties (get Panyong Needles some time) to the various grades of Indian tea, which need a secret decoder ring to comprehend, to the amazing Georgian Guria, which you can steep for about ten minutes without its going bitter.  And then there's the CTC tea, which looks like spoiled Grape Nuts and seriously needs milk and sugar to be drinkable.  I am not a fan of milk and sugar in my tea unless it's mediocre-to-crappy tea.

Oolong tea, which is partially oxidized.  Oolong tea can range from pretty strong, like Ti Kuan Yin, to exceptionally delicate and flowery.  Most oolongs are from China or Taiwan Formosa, but there are some nice Indian oolongs out there too.  Don't use boiling water, and you can re-brew the same leaves 3-4 times in one session.

Green tea, which is not oxidized.  Less caffeine, more antioxidants, blah blah.  And it tastes good, though again every tea-growing region has distinctive qualities.  Japanese and Chinese green teas taste quite different (compare Gyokuro to Pi Lo Chun sometime, or Matcha to Gunpowder Green), and there are some Indian greens out there on the market.  Again, use water that's short of boiling and you can re-brew the leaves a few times in a row.  After a year or so, it starts to go brown, so use it quickly.

White tea, the least processed and most delicate of the lot.  I'll be blunt-- any sort of heavy flavoring in white tea (anything stronger than jasmine or chrysanthemum, IMO) is a waste.  Either you're paying top dollar for tea whose flavor has been ruined by persimmon or pomegranate or bloody acai berry flavor, or you're buying extremely crappy tea with flavor slopped on it.  If you like it, that's fine, but you're being ripped off.  It's like ordering a glass of Dom Perignon and spiking it with Captain Morgan, OK?  Or ordering Two-Buck Chuck flavored with Captain Morgan and being charged Dom Perignon prices.  To each his own, I guess.

Your first taste of a genuine white tea will probably be like sipping warm, vaguely floral water.  It takes a while to appreciate this stuff.  It's subtle.  It grows on you.  Be nice to it.  And keep the goddamned pomegranates away.  I love pomegranates, but not in white tea.

Then there's the fifth horseman of the Teapocalypse, pu-erh.  This is SRS BZNS tea and one of the more wonderful innovations of mankind, up there with ice wine and distilled spirits.  It's dark-- the true "black tea"-- and the taste is a little... well, I guess these are to teas what cave-stored Roqueforts are to cheeses.  Seriously wonderful stuff, especially after a heavy meal.     

And yes, there are flavored teas and scented teas and blended teas and even some atrocities that combine tea with chocolate, but the basic infusion of Camellia sinensis leaves in hot water is a wonderful thing all on its own.  Hold the milk, sugar, honey, and lemon and keep those acai berries and stevia leaves far, FAR away.