encroaching Turkish ink-like stuff

‘Caffeine was accepted more slowly in Germany and the rest of central Europe (except Vienna) than it had been in the rest of Western Europe. This meant that England and France began to take the caffeine cure about eighty years before their central European neighbors, who continued, during this time, drinking alcohol as heavily as before. At a time when the English, for example, had already started to “dry out”, Germans were largely innocent of temperate alternatives to beer. (Still are-my note) Once the Germans, Hungarians and other East Europeans became converts, coffee and coffee houses became indispensible fixtures of the society and tea and chocolate came into general use across the breadth of the old Hapsburg Empire.’
-from The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug


This place has been in my family for generations, and I’ve never had any problems like I do now. This has always been a Gaststätte (public house). Always had guests late into the night. I could serve my customers until the wee hours, sleep a bit longer than my neighbors, and repeat the procedure the next day. It wasn’t a bad life. Until now, that is.

Until my wife brought this insanity back from Vienna. My father told me about this Turkish drink that’s black like ink. He swore he’d never seen or tasted anything like it. She comes back and insists that we serve it. At first, they only drank it after their mid-day meal, but more and more they’re coming in earlier for it and drinking it later into the evening. This new coffee and these people who drink it make my real, drinking customers uncomfortable, but the wife insists we keep serving it. She has visions of a coffee house, like the ones she saw, and says it’s the only hope we’ll ever have of seeing culture in this place. I don’t care about or even want culture. I just want to sleep a bit longer. This culture is ruining my life.

Daydreaming in Sri Lanka

Wrote about this tea in an early blogpost, but every morning, when I’m deciding which tea to start the day with, I keep coming back to Ceylon Nuwara. As I read from numerous sources, this is the Champagne of Ceylons. Full-bodied and really tasty.

It’s the dead of winter, and I’m sitting in the pre-dawn hours dreaming of being in the mountains of Sri Lanka. I’m not a beach person, so when I dream about the summer, it’s normally somewhere high in the mountains. I’d love to see these tea estates. Apparently, unlike in Assam where excellent tea is grown at much lower altitudes, in Ceylon, as well as many other places, the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes. This Nuwara is no exception.

Here I am on an early summer day, looking out over Lover’s Leap, not remotely concerned with the troubles back home. As a matter of fact while I’m lost in this reverie up on the Sri Lankan cliff, I have neither troubles at home nor a home per se. I’ve tied up all my loose ends and have embarked on a trip through the Subcontinent and China to drink all the teas at their source. And write about them.

These are my longings as I imagine myself sitting high in the mountains in the Nuwaru region of Sri Lanka. More soon about specific teas. Just wanted to share a bit of my melancholy. Brought to you by Germany’s endless winter.

Assam Mangalam

Some people shy away from black tea because it can be really dark and strong. As soon as I say that, I know that of course there are many others who only drink black tea. This post isn’t for them. I’d like to make a recommendation for those people who don’t normally drink black. Think you’ll like this one.

You have to prepare it correctly (boiling hot water and preheat your pot, too) and not let it steep too long, but Assam Mangalam is really something special. All the blurbs I’ve read about it say that this high-end tea has golden red or yellow tips and if you can look at the leaves when you buy your tea make sure you see color on the tips of some of the leaves.

The other thing I read repeatedly is that it has a rich, malty flavor and sometimes a very light aftertaste. I didn’t taste it right after it steeped but as the tea cools, I can detect it. But only a little bit. Oh, one other small thing. From more than one source, I found out that this is a black tea that’s better prepared without milk. Try it.

Eyelids in the Dirt

Reading a really interesting account of the history of tea in a book that was recommended to me recently by Indonique (The History of Caffeine by Weinberg and Bealer). Starts out with a quote from Alan Watts and I’m reminded of my Buddhist leanings when I was a teen-ager. I carried around his books and tried to decipher them, but many of the ideas took years of considering for me to even begin to comprehend.

The quote is:

“If Christianity is wine, and Islam coffee, Buddhism is certainly tea.”

There are a few stories here about the first emperor of China who “discovered” dropping leaves in boiling water, as well as the elderly sage/border guard who stops Lao Tsu as he’s making a run from China and both brews him a cuppa and somehow convinces him to write the Tao te Ching. Great stories. The book also does a good job of relaying that what historical information we have about the history of tea in China has been so thoroughly revisited and rewritten, that what we know is convoluted and very probably loosely factual, if at all. Believing that this or that emperor invented or developed tea personally in any meaningful way is like believing Pope Gregory was individually responsible for all the Gregorian Chants.

The apocryphal story that practically jumped off the page at me is one that’s too good to leave out here. Tea was unquestionably used by monks to keep them from sleeping and allow them to meditate longer. There’s no disputing that. So according to the legend, this one monk, Bodhidharma, was so disgusted at his inability to stay awake (he was already the founder of what we know today as Zen meditation and sat for years on end in silent contemplation) that upon awakening from accidentally dosing off, he took a knife and removed his eyelids (the Asian Van Gogh of sorts, eh?). When the discarded eyelids fell into the soil, they eventually grew to become the tea plant whose liquor continues to help monks meditate to this day. Slashing off your eyelids to stay focused? Ay caramba!

There’s not much left to top that story. We wind through this dynasty and that emperor only to discover that the Chinese word for tea went from meaning many things to finally being only very specifically used for the Camellia sinensis plant, whereas here in the West tea used to mean a drink from the above-mentioned plant and today it can mean one of many kinds of infusions of herbs or leaves.

This is not the last you’ll hear from me about this book. This is exactly the kind of information I was looking to find out when I started this blog.

Tea masculinity and illness

Have blathered on enough about the great milk-in-tea debate, so I’d like to move quickly away from that one. A friend recently told me he drank tea because he grew up with a lot of women, and although men didn’t drink it in his family, he didn’t care. He liked the way it tasted, so there. Funny. I hadn’t noticed what an anti-masculine bias tea had, but I guess it’s really there. I don’t know any British people who have this hang-up, but that’s unquestionably a cultural thing.

The other one that’s funny, and I get this one a lot in Germany, is that people assume you’re ill when you’re drinking tea. I can’t believe how many times people have offered me coffee as I arrive for an appointment and when I politely decline and show them my thermos of tea, they ask, “Oh, are you sick?” Clearly some drink tea only when they feel under the weather.

I don’t see why I need to fight against these two views of tea. Can’t even call them misconceptions if it’s really the case that in some circles only women and the infirmed brew up. It’s merely funny. And when I’m faced with it, as I was again today, I have to laugh. Yes I have both gender and hypochondriacal issues…so? They taste lovely.

Milk-in-my-tea crowd

You know, thanks to all of you in the milk-in-my-tea crowd, I've gotten back in the habit of spritzing my tea with a bit of moo-juice. Read something somewhere recently that adding milk to tea destroys the healthy qualities of tea. And my answer to that? So...

Health benefits of tea are extra for me. I drink enough tea without milk or sugar that I'm sure I'm getting all anti-oxidised the rest of the time. Right now I'm drinking this cup for the taste. And some teas taste better with a bit of milk. Am really digging Ceylon Nuwara these days (wrote about it a while back), but for breakfast I'm drinking Ceylon Bop Uva. Tastes fine without the shot of lactose, but am loving it with.

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