Anyone else out there drink tea nonstop like I do? Years and years ago I started out with sweetened cold brew tea from Wal-Mart. After that I started drinking it unsweetened. After that I switched to flavored hot tea from Wal-Mart (unsweetened). Now I'm on to loose leaf tea. Been drinking it for several months now. I get it from www.englishteastore.com. I get mainly green tea, white tea, and tisanes. I used to get flavored black teas too, but they stain my teeth pretty easily. They also have less antioxidants than green and white IIRC...oh and you can't re-use black tea leaves, but you can use green and white tea leaves two or three times.

My favorite is probably:

Superior Gunpowder green tea



Best green tea I've ever had. Strong flavor, and no other flavors added. I love it.

Some other great ones I've had are:

Cinnamon Sibu green tea
Earl Grey green tea
Long Island Strawberry green tea
Some kind of white tea, can't remember which one was the best
Mercedes Apple Spice herbal tea
Bella Coola herbal tea
Egyptian Camomile herbal tea - apparently relaxes you and makes you sleepy; good alternative to actual tea that has caffeine if it's late and you don't want to be up all night
Lavender herbal tea
Peppermint herbal tea - REALLY strong mint smell...it'll knock you back the first time you smell it...it's good though
Bourbon St Vanilla Rooibos - never had rooibos before a few weeks ago...apparently it's some kind of African bush or something...this blend smells and tastes amazing

They taste so much better than the stuff you'll find at Wal-Mart, and if you do the math you'll find that most of them actually cost less ounce for ounce.

I also got this "Bodom Assam" teapot which is perfect for brewing loose leaf tea:





Anyone else? Favorite types/flavors?

I'm very interested in tea. well as interested as one can be i guess. Basically i just go to my grocery store and buy a diff box of tea bags each time. I forget what i like the best, but I can tell u Dynasty green tea sux.

cool thread. i got nothing to add but cool thread.

Turkish apple tea \o/

Goddammit, I did a huuuuge thread a couple of years back on teas. No trace of it in the search, how far back does it go? Ah well.

Suffice to say that my tea cabinet is bulging, in that sense I am stereotypically British.

In fact, I have so many teas that even for cocktail parties where tea is an addition I usually brew up 3 kinds (eg last time, Camomile, Earl Grey and English Breakfast all got prepped).

I started on basic tea (blend, milk), dipped into the supersweet world of Turkish Apple Tea and have gone from there.

I don't know where to start recommending - perhaps by leaf/region?

Sri Lanka-
Visited last year. Excellent teas; particular recommendations:

- Galle Orange Pekoe 1: low-level grown tea, delicious malty taste, a robust cup. Take without milk.

- Somerset Estate Broken Orange Pekoe: mid-level, makes a good strong cup of tea which can take milk.

- Doombagastawalaya Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe: a delicate high-level FBOP which has a smooth velvety texture and a great finish, but cannot stand milk added to it.

- Dilmah Silver Needle white tea: taking a leaf out of China's book (arf arf), this one is a pretty strong contender for white tea - not as good as the best Chinese ones, but still great, doesn't have that terrible crushed oyster-shell fishy aroma of poorer white tea exponents.

I would strongly recommend seeking out Dilmah teas, they are an excellent brand with good coverage of all of SL which makes a great range of teas; should have something for everyone

India

- Chai: HOT, STRONG, very very sweet and milky. Not a lot of tea in here, mostly milk and sugar, but oh the masala blend; cardamom the most prominent. Delicious.

- Assam: a good cup which not only tastes nice on its own, strong and malty, but also blends well - recommend the following; 1/3 of either Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong to 2/3 Assam. Nice cup either one, the Assam "takes the edge off" the infusion. I find Earl Grey can be too bergamot-y at times, ditto the applewood in LS.

I'm gonna stick my neck out and say it - i am not a fan of Darjeeling. It's just far too pale and wishywashy. That said I am a big fan of monster strong cups. So I'm biased.

China

- Jasmine dragon pearls: I looooooooooove jasmine tea. A really good, fresh jasmine tea is delicious; delicate, fragrant, sweet and flavoursome. I totally recommend buying top end on this, no dried willowy leaves, get the rolled pearls which unfurl gently in the cup. You can't get much better.

- Chrysanthemum tea: not the sweetened stuff out of a can; dried crysanth flowers. A great herbal cup with the merest hint of menthol to recommend it.

- any top-end first flush/first pick/downy white tea - for the same reasons as the SL one, only better.



I'm not averse to the frequent (4x day?) cup of hot strong blended teabag tea crap, being a brit, but I think time should be taken to expand the horizons. If you taste single estate teas from different altitudes/regions you really can see the world of difference - and that's before you take into account herbals too.

What a great drink.

what water do you use? The water near me is really scummy and I'd hate to ruin a nice tea by using **** water.

Mrs Harris's family home, where i am now, has some of the WORST water around for tea- it's hard as hell, seriously, limescale buildup 24/7; descaling the kettle keeps it clear for 2 days tops. It's horrid.

As a result, here, I only drink crappy blend teabag tea, as it'd be a waste.

I would recommend just passing the water through a brita filter to remove the chlorine/CACO3/drech first. Really, using bottled/mineral water would be excessive when on the whole filtered tap water will do the job just fine.

We had hard (not as hard) water in SW england and the brita filter got out all the scale and chlorine - i'll take that for starters.

Nice post Peter.

I'd like to try that Dragon Pearls stuff, as I've always read great reviews about it, but it's a lot more expensive than the stuff I've been buying, and I can't really justify the cost.

I'll definitely be looking into your other suggestions though.

Yeah my water is pretty hard here...I can see the residue in my kettle after a few uses.

I'm a self-proclaimed tea snob and have been absolutely hoooked on mighty leaf tea lately. Will pay attention to this thread, but mighty leaf chamomile citrus, white, and mint teas are absolutely unreal. The best teas by far.

The best tea on the planet is made by a company in Portland, Oregon called Tazo. It is unreal, especially their Passion and Orange Spice flavors.

For those of you who have listed your favorites and such...how much are you paying for them? Just curious because a lot of the ones I get from the site I listed are less than $1/oz, which is considerably less than other stores I have looked at. Probably isn't the highest quality stuff though I'm guessing, lol.

i'm sure i'll be ridiculed but i love arizona sweet tea and occasionally make arnold palmers with either regular iced tea or cold green tea

- Tazo tea is available in the UK in certain coffee stores; think Starbucks do (but they were Seattle originated, so I guess Portland teas aren't that far away?)

- Mint tea - an excellent digestif. Perfect just drunk hot and minty or with a dab of sugar. Totally brilliant, can't believe I overlooked it.

- King, if you are currently drinking crappy jasmine tea, you're seriously wasting your money. The pearls are a good buy because if you are doing it by the mug [I drink big] you never need more than 9 pearls and it can stand 1, maybe 2 top ups.

You don't get any of the awful, astringent, bitter taste you get from reused or oversteeped leaves, nor is it as powerfully coloured. you are getting good value.

That said, just go in one day and think "hey, it's cheaper than the first flush downy silver needle white tea, so if I buy that I'm saving money!". Heheheheh.

I brought back a lot of tea from SL, where I was paying somewhere around the £1.50 ($2.10) for ~170g of high quality black tea.

The white tea was around £10 ($14) for 80g, but has great longevity.

Jasmine dragon pearls I got a free bunch off because the tea seller thought i was hot (this was a while ago, I assure you), but you wouldn't pay £10/80g for this, I would expect to pay £7-8 for 100g.


I'm not advocating tea snobbery - I have just drained my morning cup of teabag brew - but it's one of those things that a well stocked cupboard really does wonders for.

That said I'm similar with coffees (3-4 types in my flat minimum at all times) and cocktails (50% strength following a moving-away rebuild). Must be something about drinking.

Good to see you again, Pete.

I will second the Orange Pekoe recommendations. My other favorite is Russian Caravan which is a Chinese tea blend with a great smokey flavor.

I began drinking tea exclusively five years ago because coffee was tearing me apart, and never looked back.

I get all my tea from Special Teas. Their prices are good, selection is great, and I really like their interface. The "reorder" option is great, because I'm usually just re-ordering my standards, which are:

Ceylon Kenilworth OP


This is my go-to tea. The website describes it as:

As referenced above, it's a subtle tea. I drink a TON of tea, and I get sick of strongly-flavored teas pretty quickly (I don't like Earl Grey, for instance).

For variety, I also go with:

Mount Everest Breakfast Blend


East Friesian Broken Blend



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At home I use the large Bodum pot because in the morning I need to cram five cups of tea into my body to wake up. I'm starting to avoid anything other than the larger whole-leaf loose teas because either broken blends or anything fine gets caught in the Bodum's strainer and are annoying to clean out.

At work I use this thing:

Smart Tea Maker


It works very well.

I should include a picture of my teeth but someone reading this might be eating.

I did some research lately on automatic tea makers. It looks like there's only one out there that functions differently than a coffee pot (which is of course necessary because the tea needs time to steep) and the carafe was smaller than would be useful to me. But if anyone stumbles across the ideal one-button tea maker (or, even better, something I can set up and program before I go to sleep), please let me know.

Yo ads,

Russian Caravan is goot, man, goot.

wrt my teeth - yellow as hell. Typical brit - well actually, I still have all my adult teeth and no fillings, so not quite typical!

Can drinking too much tea be unhealthy?

Do all teas stain your teeth or just the darker teas.

All of them will to an extent probably. I would guess that any drink that isn't clear or white will stain teeth.

Most tea has some amount of caffeine in, but not as much as coffee. In that sense, tea can be unhealthy.

Ditto if you drink too much tea during the day you may get hyponatremia from excessive consumption of liquids.

You may also burn yourself as 75deg C is the perfect point for most teas, +/- 5.

Think that's most of the obvious ways they can damage your health.

Wrt staining - the higher the level of tannins in the tea, the more likely they are to stain your teeth. As a result things like camomile, white tea, crysanth tea are much less likely to than ones like Fujian Oolong, Lapsang Souchong etc.

cool thx guys =)

I get my tea from Adagio.

I make it in the awesome IngenuiTEA teapot, makes it great, easy to clean up after. I don't like infusers and messing around with a lot of stuff. This thing you just put the tea in and when it's steeped, set it on your cup and the tea just pours out.

Gunpowder isn't exactly the most luxurious green tea out there, but this one has a nice smoky flavor if steeped 3 minutes or less. If over steeped, bad flavors result. Nine cents a cup.

I put in a teaspoon of the gunpowder and a teaspoon of their peppermint. zomg deliciousness ensues.

At night I switch to chamomile and spearmint.

I put all my water through a Brita.

I have been brewing simple lipton green tea the past couple of years and enjoy it, but I have never even considered brewing fresh tea leaves before. Very insightful thread I am going to upgrade my tea habits now

TAZO tea is the best tea

I like strong black teas - small leaf & the occasional green tea. I don't like the fruit/scented/flavoured teas at all.

The difference between a well brewed pot of tea, and using a tea-bag, is significant - even given the same tea. Similarly, a poorly brewed pot is no good at all.

I like to brew it in an old-fashioned tea pot - all pre-heated - and pour into heated cups unstrained.

Second best way to start the day.