blindingly optimistic

I can feel my sense of taste coming back to me. For a few days there, I was drinking really strong (even bad tea) and getting nothing but a inconsequential jolt of caffeine. It was often loaded with Vitamin C and obscene quantities of honey, and I could barely tell. The consistency of the tea was a bit sludgier, so I guess the texture was noticeably different. But for a tea lover, having this sort of cold was the worst sort of punishment.

So here I am back in the saddle. There was plenty of Oolong, as well as a light, floral Darjeeling. It's so nice to stop coughing and sit down with a pot of tea and the paper. I stare off and think to myself, 'My goodness, I'm glad I don't talk about politics in my tea blog.'

There are incomprehensible things going on in the world, but here I am sipping on my Pasir Nangka Java. I wonder about another American politician making questionable choices, but I'm more embarrassed by the maelstrom of coverage it gets. Is any of it really necessary? Sometimes after reading an article about all of this I wish I could scrape the information away from my polluted eyeballs.

Instead I take another sip of tea and remind myself that a Bavarian politician had a love-child in Berlin several years ago. Of course, the press had a field day. They hunted the woman and her baby down and there was plenty of hand-wringing all around. Well-meaning columnists pondered whether he could keep his rather elevated position in the German political system.

Good thing this teablog's not about politics, huh?

So, I'm reminded of an article I read in Time this last week. The article was called Optimism Bias, and gave me plenty to think about.




Very roughly summarised, it said that despite all evidence that'd lead one to be morbidly depressed about the state of everything, we're hard-wired to believe things are going to turn out blindingly well. A losing streak has to end at some point. The storm was yesterday, and this is the first day of the rest of your life.






I don't know about all of that. But as I drain the last of this pot of tea, I weigh my options for the next tea I'll brew. Maybe there is something to this optimism, after all.

Drinking very masculine Java tea

Have had a lot of tea grown on the Pasir Nangka tea estate in Java lately.

Wrote about Java Santosa last year (Startles me awake), and I still like tea from this region. This one might even be better than the earlier one. Maybe.

This one is strong like a good Assam, but not a lot of tannic acid. So it's not at all bitter. That's why I like to use Java tea in blends of black teas. There's something fruity and spicy in the taste as well.

Did a bit of research about tea from this region, and what I learned is that they started out planting tea plants from China here in Indonesia. For some reason, they switched to tea plants from Assam at some point.

Am rather curious why tea grown from the same plant, but grown in an entirely different region, has such a dramatic difference in taste. Any thoughts on that one?