Monday, September 5, 2011

Tea Revolution - it's brewing

I found this article in the Easter Weekend Sydney Morning Herald this year and I torn it out.  I promptly stashed it somewhere and forgot about it until I was doing a little tidying on the weekend and up it popped!

Tea Revolution - it's brewing
By Sue Bennett


A cup of tea.  In my grandma's day, it was such a simple thing - tea, boiling water, milk and sugar.


Whatever happened?  Today we have tea to pick you up, tea to bring you down, teas with a "bombshell" of health benefits, tea as a digestive and tea to send you to sleep.


There's a Tetley tea especially for soy "milk" drinkers (a zingy high-grown Kenyan little number) and Twinings is bringing out an Australian Blend.


Boutique producer T2 goes one better with teas that recognise state border: Brisbane Breakfast is happy, bright and tropical with a "teeny touch" of sunny mango; Melbourne Breakfast is worthy of a rich infusion; Sydney Breakfast is "lively and vivacious", a blend of orthodox leaf tea (let me read that again... orthodox leaf tea?).  This cheeky little brew "captures the sunny optimism of a Sydney morning".


Tea description are worthy of the finest wines.  Teas can be full-bodied , earthy with a hint of mushroom, aromatic and fragrant with a lingering hint of honey.


Some teas are so rare and expensive, buyers have their names on waiting lists for years and are prepared to pay astronomical prices.  In 2002, 20 grams of Da Hong Pao, or Big Red Robe, from Wuyi in China sold for $23,000.


Yet tea doesn't have any of the cachet of coffee in contemporary life.  There are coffee carts and bars on every corner and an almost indecipherable language to non-drinkers, like double shot, skinny soy latter.


Tea drinkers are reduced to an often paltry selection in restaurants and cafes.  They all do English Breakfast - the adopted term for regular tea - but it can be hit and miss with other blends and flavours.


And let's not talk about tea preparation.


Textbooks are written about barista training.  These masters of the coffee machine traverse the globe with their skills and compete for coveted awards.  A tea maker in an Australian cafe or restaurant simple needs the ability to turn the kettle on.


But take a walk down the supermarket tea aisle to see a vast, and ever expanding, array of brands, flavours and hinted health benefits.


While we leave the house in search of a coffee, tea drinking is all about home.  It's about snuggling down with a good book, giving healthy living a kick or sharing a brew with a friend.  For those completely sucked in, those scenarios require teas to soothe, detox and invigorate.  They are all there.  But the beauty is the preparation.  At home, it's down just how we like it in our own kitchen.


Maybe not for much longer.  New York has discovered the tea salon.  It can't be long before it crosses the Pacific. 




A girl can wish!!

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