we've no time to wash the things between whiles

`Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh: `it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.' 

Howdy, lahikmajoe's teabloggians. Lahikmajoe has been kind enough to let me guest-blog today. This is always a treat because then I get to be goofy elsewhere, other than my home. I’ve been here before. You might remember me. I’m the one who knows very little about tea and is very willing to try it, but hasn’t found anything to make her want to drink it on a regular basis yet.

Today I went on a very grand adventure. This adventure was a few months in the making, so it’s exciting that it actually finally happened. Yes, it was a tea adventure. It would be a odd if I was here and it wasn’t a tea-related adventure, now wouldn’t it? Yes. Yes, it would.

A few months ago, I noticed a sign go up in a field that I drive past on my way to work. 

This is kind of what the sign looked like. ANYWAY, I was all, “Hey, lahikmajoe, I think we’re getting a tea place, or maybe a sewing shop, when it opens, I should check that out, yeah?”

Then I kind of totally forgot about it completely because life got in the way. It happens.

Then a couple of weeks ago, the local paper reviewed the place I’d completely forgotten about, and I thought, oh, oh, crap, I totally forgot about that place. I guess it opened. Whoops!

So I went to the website and I brought up the tea menu and I asked lahikmajoe if it looked any good and if I should go there. He said there were plenty of decaf options for me (I’m not supposed to have caffeine, because one of my cadre of doctors - yep, I have a cadre of them, I’m a whole medical miracle - told me that caffeine was a migraine trigger, and it seems to be the case, because when I cut the caffeine out, my migraines mostly stopped, too) but here’s the thing - I didn’t want to go to a fancy tearoom and have decaf, because the decaf options were mostly herbal, and it seemed like going to a tea place for tea that doesn’t really have tea in it would be like going to an amusement park for the people watching. It seems like a waste. You’re THERE, you really need to participate in what’s going ON. 

Plus, I really, really, REALLY wanted to try Oolong. Lahikmajoe talks about it all the time and makes it sound wonderful. Even if I tried it and hated it, I wanted to see what it tasted like. And they had Wu Yi Oolong. Doesn’t that even SOUND fancy and like you’re going on an exotic vacation? It totally does.

So I decided, let’s try something with caffeine, and see what happens. It’s probably been 12 years since the “don’t have anymore caffeine” edict, and I’ve changed a lot since then, so who knows what will happen.

So this morning! I got up at 6:45am. ON A SUNDAY. I know. I’m very dedicated. Oh, last night, lahikmajoe gave me a tutorial on Oolong and oxidation and such, which was nice. It was like going to the tea place with prior knowledge. Like I was a secret agent.

I got to The Tailored Tea at a little after 8am. I had lahikmajoe on call. I think it’s important to have a tea expert on call for situations like this, don’t you? Sure it is, come on.

The Tailored Tea looks like this. I am stealing this photo from the Albany Times Union website, because the photo I took...well, here’s their photo:

inviting, eh? you'd go there for some tea, wouldn't you?

And here’s MINE, because I felt like a weirdo standing in the street to take a good photo, so I stood off to the side and it looks terrible.

incognito photography

I’ll never be mistaken for a professional photographer, that’s for sure. Also, there’s the Midas Brake Center and the Dunkin’ Donuts. Hi, chain establishments!

So I was the first person there. That’s a little worrisome. The staff pays a LOT of attention to you when you’re the first person there.

Now, most of you probably already read the review The Purrfect Cup did of the same place? She’s more knowledgeable than I am. So, if you didn’t, here. This is a much less scatterbrained review of the same place.

Lahikmajoe said I should ask the waitress if they do multiple infusions, and if they did, tell him, because that was the way to go. And that they would know what he was talking about. He’s the tea expert. I said I would.

I was seated at the TINIEST TABLE EVER. So, so tiny. I was immediately sure I was going to break something. I am a total bull in a china shop. Oh, also? There was a LOT of china. This had utter disaster written all over it. I immediately tucked in my elbows and prayed I would be coordinated, just for an hour or so.

The table settings were pretty. All classic linen and mismatched china.

doesn't the china look nervous?

The waitress was young and seemed very sweet. So I was kind of nervous asking her about the infusion thing. But lahikmajoe said to. So I did.

“Um...infusions...I don’t...do you want to know how we brew our tea?” she asked.

I explained that no, I was pretty sure that wasn’t what it meant - it was more about how many times you used the leaves. (Sheesh, lahikmajoe, I hope that’s right. I didn’t know there would be a quiz.)

“Oh. We steep the teabags for three minutes,” she said, very happy she knew the answer this weird person was wanting.

Teabags? Oh. Um. I don’t think a fancy tearoom is supposed to have teabags. That’s a worry. (And actually really confusing, because before I left, the owner came and talked to me, and you can buy any of the teas they sell there loose-leaf. So why do they have them in teabags? Do they put them in teabags themselves? Or was the waitress just ill-informed? She was utterly adorable. I don’t want to get her in trouble.)

So I told her whatever they did would be fine and got a half-pot of Oolong, which is supposed to be 2.5 cups. She asked if I wanted her to leave the teabag in or out. She said if she left it in, it would get very strong. “Out, out, please out,” I said. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like strong tea.

I also ordered a big old omelette because it had ham and cheese in it. Yum.

She brought out the tea. The teapot was bigger than I expected. She poured me a cup in my tiny, very delicate-looking teacup. Oh, please don’t let me break this, I thought. That’d be so embarrassing.

first cup of Oolong

I looked around the table. No cream. No Splenda. I’m sure they HAD such things, but I’d have to ask for them, and the poor waitress was busy by then. Three other parties had come in. And they were old, and they were demanding. (More on these shenanigans later.)

I wanted to try it without anything in it first anyway. It’s not fair to try something to see if you like it with a bunch of add-ons. That’s like salting a meal before you even taste it to see if it needs salt.

My take on Oolong...it tastes like flowers. And it doesn’t taste as tea-like as the other types of tea lahikmajoe has encouraged me to try. He wanted to know if it tasted like anything else. My answer is? Probably, but I’m not the person to ask. I don’t have a fancy palate. My favorite meal is honestly chicken fingers. All I tasted (and smelled) was flowers.

And I drank an entire half-pot (without cream or Splenda) all by myself. Without even a grimace. I actually liked it quite a lot. It was smooth, it didn’t have that weird aftertaste, and it made me feel like a fancy lady to be drinking it out of a nice teacup at a table with a tablecloth on it.

And and AND, it’s been a couple of hours, and no migraine. Not even a headache. It could still be coming, I suppose, but the only after-effects I’ve experienced so far are I’m hyped up like a crazy person (listen, YOU try not having any caffeine for 12 years and then having a half-pot of tea, which was supposed to be 2.5 cups but was really 3.5 cups!) and all the peeing. ALL THE PEEING.

Oh, the other people in the teashop? Ok, so there were three other tables of people.

Table one: crotchety demanding couple. They complained about everything to one another. “I don’t LIKE bacon. Why don’t they have TURKEY bacon.” Blah blah blah. (Also, turkey bacon is an abomination of nature, lady. Get with the program.) When the waitress cleared their table, they waited for about .0005 seconds, then the wife went LOOKING for her, out by the KITCHEN, for the check. I could hear her haranguing the staff, “We’re ready for our BILL now!” (Granted, the wait for my bill was interminable, too, but I was nicer about it. I had my phone to entertain me.)

Table two and table three: Old people who knew each other from a billion years ago. Table two said to table three, "Hey, is that you, Mary Alice? We used to volunteer at the church together!" And they were off, reminiscing about old times. The best thing though? The best thing? Table two was telling table three about a diner she liked to go to, and table three said - actually said - “Are there HIPPIES there?” And table two said, “Um. Hippies?” And table three said, “Every time I drive by, there are ALL THE HIPPIES hanging around outside.” Table two laughed uncomfortably and said, “We go very early, so there are no...um...hippies there. Then. No.” I was trying VERY HARD not to laugh out loud. THOSE DAMN DIRTY DINER-RUINING HIPPIES.

(I promise I wasn’t being openly eavesdroppy. The people didn’t know I was listening to them. I can listen and look like I’m not. I’m very good at it.)

Also, and I just kept thinking, “This would make lahikmajoe so sad,” because all three tables, the MINUTE they sat down, said a variant of “You DO have coffee here, RIGHT?” I think a couple of the ladies might have gotten tea, but mostly the men they were with were all TEA IS BAD NEWS WE DISTRUST THIS TEA NONSENSE. One guy actually said, “I’ll have coffee. And KEEP IT COMIN’.” OK, Hopalong Cassidy.

When I was done, the owner came and checked in with me about how I liked my food and my beverages (I did! Very much!) and then I went home. Oh, this is their backyard:

the backyard, which is really the airport

The backyard is the airport. Some people really dig watching planes lift off and land. I’m not as charmed. They’re just planes. 

So. The Tailored Tea in Latham, New York. I’m all-systems-go on this place. It’s cute and it’s fancy (so tuck in those elbows, people as clumsy as me) and the food is good and priced reasonably. You will probably be the youngest person in the room by about 40 years if you are my age.

And...Oolong. Well, so far I have tried black tea (in chai), Rooibos (NOT REAL TEA!), green tea, and a weird licorice herbal thing. Oolong wins hands-down.

What’s next, lahikmajoe?

teascapades of a tea newbie

a note from your regularly scheduled teablogger: this post is written by Jim. You will immediately be able to tell that Jim is not a tea drinker. Why on earth would I turn the reigns of a teablog over to the likes of this guy? Why indeed. 


Well, I write this blog partially with the tea newcomer in mind, and he's curious about tea. He writes some very funny non-tea-related blogs, and I knew he'd do something entertaining with it. And that he certainly did. 


One important thing to remember: this is just the beginning with Jim and tea. He's already agreed to be a recurring character on the teablog. Without further ado, I bring you our guest teablogger:

I like to try new things, and while tea isn’t “new” to me, having access to someone who might know a bit about tea is. In the past, I tried tea as a substitute for coffee, specifically, Lipton tea. Everyone knows that Lipton is the name in mass produced tea. Right? Right?

So I tried it, and honestly it made me sick to my stomach. Not initially, but after a couple cups. I found it was a little harsh on an empty stomach (much like coffee can be) and eventually I gave it up as a bad job.

Nearly a decade later, enter Twitter, toss in a mildly humorous and nearly contentious miscommunication spawned from incorrectly linking to people’s blogs. . . and I found Ken. And in finding Ken, found someone to ask all my annoying questions about the mysterious world of tea.

I tapped that resource for the first time in the middle of a grocery trip this past weekend. Without copy and pasting the exchange, essentially it amounted to this: Assuming Ken was more or less waiting by his phone/pc for my tweet, I said, “quick, I’m at the store, what tea should a newbie try?” and he, apparently actually sitting by his phone/pc waiting for my tweet began to guide me to the best of his abilities to my best choice.

Yeah. . . so there are a lot of options. And I tried tweeting this picture to Ken, but I was in a wifi-less store, and it kept timing out. So after Ken had asked a couple questions about what sorts of tastes I preferred, he offered me four or five options. And believe it or not, the store only had one of them. I mean, are you looking at that shelf? That’s just the Stash choices I could fit in the picture. . . Anyway, we settled on Stash English Breakfast.

Ken wanted me to get filters, but I couldn’t find tea filters to save my life, so that apparently put loose-leaf tea out of the equation. But fear not, regardless, of whether this tastes like ass, I will totally try loose-leaf tea because it’s different, and I like trying different things. Not ass. That was probably misleading how I wrote that in there. But different things.

 So I had the tea. Now I drink coffee in the mornings ordinarily, and I won’t lie, sometimes when I finish my gigantic travel mug full o’ joe, I feel a little bit like I’m going to throw up. That doesn’t stop me from doing the same thing the following day, mind you, cause my mama didn’t raise no quitters, but I knew I wouldn’t try tea on a day that I was already queasy from caffeine overdose. Today was that day!!

The very first thing I did was find my finest heirloom porcelain tea cup. Because tea evokes all sorts of images in my head of cultured snobby people drinking tea out of fine

china with their pinkies in the air.

Mission accomplished. I filled it with the finest tap water money can buy and prepared my tea kettle microwave.

Ken had told me to heat the cup, and essentially what I did was. . . heated the cup and water in the microwave until it boiled. Once it boiled, I removed it from the microwave and plopped the tea bag in it.

Ken (and the packaging) said to steep it for three minutes. I set my duck timer (the duck timer is win/win/win. 1) “When Timer Ends Duck.” That’s funny. I can see people actually ducking when the timer goes off (as instructed), 2) ducks are funny, 3) when I use it with my kids I can blame the duck for why they have to finish doing whatever it is they’re doing, “sorry kids, the duck quacked.”)

So I steeped. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t trust Brownian motion to disperse my tea evenly throughout my hot water, so I. . . in the absence of Ken’s learned guidance. . . bobbed the tea bag up and down in the water a couple times. I didn’t continually do it, because Ken’s instructions hadn’t explicitly spelled out how I was to steep, but he hadn’t mentioned bobbing, so I felt certain I was going outside the framework of accepted tealore, but I fucking did it anyway, because sometimes, in the absence of instructions to the contrary, you just go with your gut. Plus I’m American, and if history has taught me one thing, it’s that when Americans get a hold of tea, they do unexpected things with it.

Further to my discussion of Brownian motion...when the timer was done, and the duck quacked and I had ‘ducked’ and then chuckled at how funny I think I am. . . I threw the bag away and I stirred the tea. Because it seemed to me at the time that if I didn’t trust Brownian motion to disperse my tea evenly through the water, I may as well help the process of mixing and get a good uniform dispersion. Ken had told me not to squeeze the bag out so I didn’t.

Finally, I was ready to drink my tea. But, as I was about to take my first sip two things

occurred to me. 1) It was so hot I was going to burn the shit out of myself, and 2) pinkies

up, yo!

Something they don’t teach you at tea academy is that if you’re using a big giant Bugs Bunny coffee mug as your fine china, it’s really heavy and you should be careful not to be too cavalier with your pinky erection lest you spill hot tea all over yourself when the mug slips from your grasp.

pinkies up, yo!

pinkies in the air...like you just don't care

Okay, I don’t know what the tea pros say, but when tea is so scalding hot you can barely tolerate it in your mouth? It’s also too hot to taste. So I waited a while longer. Because to quote Ralph Wiggums, “It tastes like burning.”

It, okay and don’t hate on me here, tasted like Lipton.

Now Ken suggested that if I drank coffee with cream and sugar, I might enjoy tea the same way. I suspect so, and for whatever reason it never even occurred to me to add cream to tea. But my next attempt will be to add a little and see if I like it better. The short answer to the question of is English Breakfast a better choice than crappy ol’ Lipton may, unfortunately, have to be “no”. At least at this early tea age, I’m not really tasting any difference.

Jim pretending to enjoy his tea goodness

guest blogposts

Over the next several weeks I'm going to have a few guest blogposts. I tried this last year with someone I successfully lured over to the leaf-side, and we'll hear from her and how her tea tastes have changed over time.

That should be interesting. I think you'll agree.

There're also a few other people in the tea world I'd like to talk to and possibly interview here. There are German tea experts whose sites/teablogs I'm reading that have some ideas worth discussing. Maybe a different perspective than what you might get in your corner of the tea community.

So, you've been warned. If you come here and there's a voice/author you didn't expect to find here, it's an attempt to spice things up a bit. Enjoy.