I remember the first time I had ever come across tea in my life. It was a warm autumn afternoon, the bright sun finally setting beneath Sombrero Peak outside the window of our kitchen/dining room. I sat there with my little brother at our dinner table, working on homework from that day at Richardson Elementary school. My mother was cooking dinner while we worked on our addition and subtraction papers. I was very tired, and so I asked my mom if she could make me some coffee to wake me up. She laughed and said she would make me some tea instead. She grabbed from the cupboard a box of regular 100-count Orange Pekoe black bagged tea from the cupboard. Just an average store brand box of black tea. She filled two mugs with water and heated it in the microwave. She tossed the tea bags in and gave them to us along with the sugar bowl.
When I first tasted it, the tea was very bitter and tangy, so I added one, two, three spoonfuls of sugar. When I tasted it again, the tea was wonderful! The smooth sweetness of the warm liquid woke me up and allowed me to finish my homework well before dinner was ready. From that day forward, I would continue to make my brother and myself tea every day after school, adding copious amounts of sugar to the tea. Back then, I would never have guessed that this simple beverage would inspire such interest for me in my high school days.
Fast forward to middle school. I had stopped making tea regularly, and had switched to coffee drinking. The only time I had tea was when I, my dad, and my brother had decided to watch "Avatar: The Last Airbender." My dad bought this box of bagged tea known as white tea. Now for those of you who don’t know, there are eight different types of tea, which I will cover more in a later article. The tea was nothing at all like the tea I had grown up drinking. The color was a light yellow, almost like the color of extremely watered down lemonade. It smelled similar to green tea, but with a slight floral scent to it as well. I added some honey to this, and it tasted amazing! Not at all tangy and bitter like the black tea, but smoother and almost creamy in texture.
However, it wasn’t until my Junior year in high school when my journey into tea became an absolute obsession. I remember my English teacher, Mrs. Kirk, providing us with reading day. We all had the option of having tea while we read. I picked an Irish breakfast Twining's teabag and went to steep it. I drank it without any sweetener at all and was amazed at how delightful the tea was. It was malty, tangy, and strong. It reminded me of the times in elementary school when I would brew up those bags of orange pekoe tea. So after this experience, I decided I would drink tea every day, a practice which I have not yet broken to this day. I started branching out, buying different varietals of bagged teas, writing down companies I liked and ones I didn’t like. I quickly developed a collection of bagged teas that I carried with me at school, making tea for me, the teachers, and some of the students as well.
Not long after that, I was introduced to Teavana, by Mrs. Kirk as well. She gave me a tin of Jasmine Dragon Pearl green tea. I had recently become obsessed with jasmine tea and had never experienced it in loose leaf form. The difference here is the tea leaves are not cut and crushed into a near dust, but kept whole to provide better flavor, and less bitterness and steeped without a bag. From then on, I bought and drank tons of tea from Teavana, even hosting the occasional tea tasting after school in Mrs. Kirk’s room. It was an absolute joy.
Yet, I only had just scratched the surface of the vast world of tea. Slowly I started to branch out to more pure forms of tea, without all the fruits and flowers added to them. I started ordering teas from companies in Canada, England, China, Japan, India, and even Russia (I to this day prefer Chinese teas above all the others). I learned about the different brewing styles, the importance of temperature of water, the teas origin stories, and all the special intricacies and differences that the world of tea has to offer. To this date, my room is filled with gaiwans (Chinese tea brewing vessel, looks like a lidded cup), yixing (a porous clay found in China) clay teapots, teacups, and of course, hundreds of different types of tea. I had found my cup of tea quite literally at long last.
