Guest Post: Chinese Style of Drinking Tea

Hey Everyone!

swampthings and I are guest posters on each others' blogs today. Here's his post, and check out my post on his blog, semioriginalthought.blogspot.com. Learn just how I became such an avid tea lover. I started quite young, no wonder Im a professional now...go visit Semi-Original Thought, their are pictures to prove it!

XOXO

Yours Truly

I watched a Chinese friend of mine preparing her tea once.  She had these green tea buds or tips or something, put a lot of them all loose in a cup, added some cool dried fruits I'd never seen before, and let it steep.  Then, she'd sip the tea around the floaties in the cup, and keep pouring more hot water into the tea. This way, she had flavorful tea throughout the day, but all from the same cup.  She also said that toward the end of the day, she'd eat the tasty dried fruits, which were now no longer dried, but full of juicy tastefulness.

I stared, and I said, "wow, that's cool tea."

She gave me some green tea and fruits, and for the rest of the day, I tried to mimic exactly what she was doing so I could get the full experience of the Chinese style of drinking tea. I thought it was really cool to be able to drink loose tea without a bunch of contraptions or French presses.Now, I know from the book Kick-Ass, but not the movie Kick-Ass, that there are 2 billion Chinese people in the world.  And I know I'm generalizing here, that all 2 billion people can't possibly all drink tea in exactly the same way. But, I felt I was getting some culture and doing something cool by drinking around the loose tea leaves.

Also, I'm very cooking impaired, so this style totally resolves my problems of having to measure stuff. I just have to dump a bunch in the cup to start. If it's too strong, I add more water. If it's too weak, I add more leaves.

I found Teavana's Raspberry Riot Lemon Mate tea through a sponsor on LahTeaDah's excellent Tea website. And this Raspberry tea is just amazing.  At first glance it looks like they took the tastiest things in the world, and put them all together in a tea.  It contains apple pieces, raspberry pieces, hibiscus flowers, rosehip peels, rosebuds, lemongrass, mate, and Vitamin C. Everything that's tasty in the world, I say.





Tea Type: I'm not sure, maybe someone could explain to me what "mate" is.

Tea Tasting Location: Friend's house. You don't really think I own a nice teapot, do you?

Tea Accompaniments: Nothing, this tea is just awesome by itself. In fact, I could eat it from the box without adding water, I think.

Leave Rating: A+++++
5 being the best - 1 being the worst

Liquor Color: Dark Raspberry color

Aroma: Awesome! Like being in a fruit orchard.

Taste: Awesome! Like being in heaven.

You know that one dried apple you had ten years ago, that was the tastiest thing you've ever had in the whole world, but you've never been able to find a dried apple like that again?  Well, this Raspberry tea has a few of those rare dried apples in it.

In fact, I think you could eat everything in this tea, apples, raspberries, rose hips. Now I'm hungry. Very hungry.

And now I'm chewing on a fistful of lemongrass.