I’m currently drinking tea. Chinese white tea. I may or may not have butchered it with some cinnamon, but it’s too hot to tell right now. I’ve also bought a cool looking Chinese (I think) teapot, so I want to step up my tea game.
Are there any tea lovers here? And if so, what do you recommend?
I love tea, I don’t drink a lot because nice tea is expensive but there is one woman who sells super tasty tea in a city next to mine so whenever I have a little extra money I buy what I can. Usually it’s green, rooibos or something not so expensive (AFAIK white, yellow and red are the most expensive ones). My set is pretty shitty, a teapot I stole from a store and coffee mugs, I also have a super small iron one which looks like traditional or something but I almost never use it for tea (instead I use it for coffee) because of its size.
My recommendation, though, is that you try mate, lol. I think it is cultivated in California over there, although in small quantities and maybe you can get some imported brands, if you get to choose and see some Argentinian brands I can recommend some, but the best one in my opinion is called La Merced.
I’ve heard a lot about mate. Luckily I live in a very multicultural city so I’ll have a look at the Latin American shops around here. Maybe they’ll have that cup thing too.
I managed to find this pot in a thrift shop for 2 euro’s or something and someone gifted me a watercooker with a temperature setting, but otherwise I was yolo’ing my way through tea as well lol.
The cup thing is also called mate, by the way, you could say yerba mate (for the herb) and mate (for the “cup”), you could also grab a gourd and make one yourself but I personally prefer the wooden ones.
Waterboiling things where you can select the temperature are great, mine only has like a meter which doesn’t tell anything to scientific so I have to kind of guess which temperature it is. If you get really into it you should check the different temperatures for different kinds of tea, also doing them with mineral water makes it a lot tastier but also more expensive.
that cup thing
That’s called a… mate. You can boil mate and brew it like tea if you can’t find one. Or just like… use a normal (smallish) cup if you can get the straw with the filter first.
Yeah, that’s called mate cocido, although IMO it’s not as good as regular mate, but it’ll do I guess. The straw is called a bombilla.
The white tea + cinnamon was not a great combo. But I could’ve known tbh
Loose leaf Tong Tji, Poci, and Sosro. I’m pretty sure they’re black teas.
One tea I drink a lot of is licorice root heavy tea, usually advertised as throat soother tea. I talk/rap/sing/scream a lot and it helps a lot and it has a really weird taste that I love bunches. I don’t know if one should or shouldn’t drink it just for hoo-ha’s though.
Licorice root can raise your blood pressure so exercise caution and use a sphygmomanometer if you’ve got one lying around.
Oh wow, that’s weird because I definitely have a higher blood pressure the last few years…around the same time I started drinking it. I thought it was my salt intake! I used to have very low blood pressure so it’s just normal now, but wow, thank you for the tip, it certainly doesn’t say that anywhere on the box.
You also shouldn’t take it with certain diuretics. Herbs and supplements are things you should use caution with in general. I know I read on my own licorice root tea box that it shouldn’t be taken for more than maybe four weeks at a time, too. So give it a break for a week every so often, but if your blood pressure is just normal it’s probably not a problem.
I recommend Lapsang souchong if you like smoky flavors.
Smokey tea does sound tasty. Thanks!
Ted Lasso, “You know, I always figured that tea was just going to taste like hot brown water. And you know what? Yeah, it’s horrible.”
