Other than a brief dalliance with coffee in high school, I’ve been a tea drinker for the vast bulk of my life. I like the smell of coffee, and I like the taste of it as complementary to the likes of, say, tiramisu. But when it comes to something to have with breakfast or something warm to casually drink in the middle of the day, it’ll be tea way more often than not.
I generally get large boxes of tea bags for day-to-day consumption, and for a really long time haven’t cared too much whether it’s the likes of English Breakfast or Orange Pekoe. It had occurred to me in the past, and again very recently, that perhaps part of the reason I don’t care about type of tea too much is because, by nature of a very old habit, I add sugar — or more recently, stevia, i.e. sweetener without the blood sugar spike — and milk to my tea. Sorry/not sorry to tea purists. But of course adding sweetener and milk will nullify an awful lot of the actual taste of the tea itself.
I can appreciate a good tasting tea, with or without sweetening and milk-ifying it. But my go-to has long been to add such things, and so cheaper, everyday brands (other than Red Rose; I’m not completely without tastebuds) kind of became the norm.
Then last week we were gifted a Keurig coffee machine, and it changed something in an unexpected way.
Now look… did we need a Keurig?
Absolutely not.
Did we want to give it a spin anyway?
Absolutely.
And so here we are.
I should say at this point, before I risk offending any eco-savvy readers, that yes, we know very well that Keurig has a horrible history of creating vast amounts of garbage for landfills around the world with their one-shot “K-Cup” pods that many recycling facilities don’t have the means, or perhaps interest, in bothering to break down into component parts (such as the recyclable plastic outer shell and aluminum foil lid) in order to recycle them. For what it’s worth, we’re already conscientiously trying to offset as much of that waste as we can, even beyond practicality. We keep the used pods and when we’ve collected a bowl full, cut them open, composting the organic material inside, cut out any filter lining, and rinse and recycle the vast bulk, if not the whole, of the readily recyclable outer plastic shell. It’s not a perfect solution, but it feels like the least we can do.
In any case…
I noticed something when my coffee-drinking wife and I went shopping for some pods to try out: The vast bulk of them, quite mysteriously, turned out to be types of coffee with almost no teas. So strange!
I’ve since rectified that, at least somewhat, by grabbing some single pods of various and sundry teas to try, in order to see what full-on boxes of pods would make for the tastiest/most logical purchase for myself.
And it struck me that to give these tastings a genuinely fair shake, I can’t go adding stevia and milk to what I’m trying. I need to try them exclusively on their own merits, which requires them to be black, for lack of a better term for a decidedly brown liquid.
So it has begun, and I’m already getting early results in.
I found this morning that I may (MAY) actually… not?… like orange pekoe? On its own, it’s a bit more floral than I recall it being. And a bit more astringent. This underscored something I’d found yesterday, when I got an orange pekoe tea from a Tim Hortons on the road, and even with the usual one sugar and two milks in it, I found it a bit… tannin-y toward the end. The last of the water that had been steeping the included tea bag for the longest time had some… not great qualities to it.
Then this afternoon I tried a (black) English Breakfast tea, and it was pretty tasty. Definitely better than my last two orange pekoes, whether they were sweet and with milk or not. Turns out that I may have been settling as often as not on getting a kind of tea that I don’t really like, entirely because I was masking its flavour so much that I didn’t often notice not liking it. I mean… wow.
So this unexpected detour of narrowing down what to buy for the Keurig, by trying straight-up teas to see what I actually like more, has been a nice reminder that everyday teas I drink don’t need to (certainly shouldn’t need to), be just okay. It’s a great chance — and at under $1 a pod, a totally affordable chance — to try out a variety of stuff from a variety of companies and see what teas I actually want to drink, entirely on their own merits.
Looking forward to seeing how it all shakes out.