Tea Tips
Grades of Tea
Like the wine ratings scale, tea has grade levels. If you see random letter groupings at the tea shop you know you’ve got a good supplier that understands higher quality teas. The different tea grades are (from lowest to highest): Dust: Break open your average lipton tea bag and you’ll see what this means. Fannings: Broken leaves. P – Pekoe: Attributed origin…
Read MoreUse fresh water
When brewing tea, you will want to use fresh water in your tea kettle – don’t reuse previously boiled water. I’m all about being ecologically minded but this is one case where you will want to pour the old water out and start fresh. If you don’t want to pour it down the drain. you could use…
Read MoreWarming the pot
Before brewing tea in your dainty teapot you might want to run hot water through it first. You just pour some hot water in, swirl it around, you can even let it sit in there for a minute or two and then pour it out. This is called “warming the pot.” You want to do…
Read Moreafternoon tea not high tea
You may hear others (I know it’s not you) mistakenly call afternoon tea “high tea.” It’s understandable because it does seem a rather highfalutin’ affair but it is incorrect to call it high tea. Afternoon tea originated, so they say, with Lady Anna Maria Stanhope, Duchess of Bedford who was a lady in waiting for Queen Victoria. The custom…
Read MoreThe tea leaf
All tea comes from the same plant: Camellia Sinensis – a cousin to our Camellia Japonica. All of the varieties of tea (black, oolong, green and white) are the result of the processing but all tea stems from the same source – the leaves of Camellia Sinensis.
Read MoreWhere to buy tea in Huntsville, AL
Drinking tea is really growing in popularity! I had to stop and do a double take at the Madison Farmers Market this summer where I discovered Samovar Gardens Tea out of Brownsboro but they seem to be popping up all over town in shops and markets here and there. The Funky Fairy out of Killen is…
Read MoreWhere it all started
Way back when, in college, I first really started getting serious about tea. I really started drinking it in college and at my first “real” job. I remember my coworkers teasing me, “Are you going to have some tea with your sugar?” when I added 3 spoonfuls of sugar to my hot tea. Back then…
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