Cananito
by Rogelio Gudino
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Jan
28th
Sat
Permalink
#tea

Official Tea Drinker

It’s been around 6 months since I got into tea. Now I can say I’m an official tea drinker (black tea specifically), still not an expert though.

As I mentioned on the previous post, I bought the then existing “Samovar Black Tea Sample Set”, because it seemed black tea would be the best fit for me.

I really haven’t tried other kind of teas, but I think I did make the right choice going with black tea, I like it a lot. Out of all the samples, my personal favorite was the Samovar Breakfast Blend. I plan to either keep buying it, or try out the English Breakfast from Adagio Teas.

Now, on to the actual brewing. My technique over time has been getting better, and my palate has been also getting better in the sense that it doesn’t need sweeteners as long as the brew is not too strong.

I started with too many leaves and a long infusion, this made a really strong brew for my newbie palate (tasted really bitter), so I had to put in a bunch of sugar. I then started to reduce the amount of leaves, but the time of infusion remained the same, so I still needed to add a bit of sugar. Right now, I’m at the point where I put in a relatively small amount of leaves and infuse it for just 2 minutes, but I don’t need to add any sugar.

So this takes me to my goals:

  • I plan to slowly keep increasing the amount of leaves and infusion time.
  • Buy an electric kettle to heat water faster and at the perfect temperature.
  • Drink tea more often.
Jul
24th
Sun
Permalink
#tea

Getting into Tea

I officially have a new passion: tea. But I’m talking about real tea, the real deal, the one you brew.

There are many things that contributed to my new passion, let me go through them one by one.

Caffeine. There are times when I just need caffeine, not huge amounts, but enough to get me through the day. There are 2 main drinks to get caffeine from: coffee and tea. Let me say first, I’m not getting into the coffee vs tea discussion. I like coffee, not enough to grow a passion out of it though, and brewing it seems complicated (if I’m going to grow a passion out of it, you have to go all the way, and thus brew your own drink). So that took me to tea, a bit more simple to brew, and love it’s taste when strongly brewed.

Samovar Tea Lounge. I’ve been watching several of Kevin Rose’s podcasts, he’s a tea drinker, and he’s mentioned Samovar quite a few times, and on one of the episodes of Foundation he interviews Jesse Jacobs (founder of Samovar Tea Lounge). On that interview he talked about tea and his tea business with so much passion, that it got me really interested on Samovar’s products, and thus, tea.

Drinking it. I’m not yet a heavy tea drinker, but I have tried real tea a several couple of times, and I liked it a lot, specially strong brewed teas like I mentioned before.

So up until this point I’m still a total tea noob, but after spending lots of time reading and watching videos on Samovar’s site and other tea sites I’ve started to learn and understand the whole art of tea.

So next step was to buy the essential tools to make great tea, after a while, I ended up ordered the following just yesterday:

So I hope to get really good at brewing tea, and become an expert on the whole topic.