Tea is one of my favorite ingestibles. It’s huge fun experimenting with different terroirs (India lowland swamp vs. India highland vs. Sri Lanka vs. China vs. Japan), processing (green vs. oolong vs. black), steeping times (anywhere from two to five minutes), re-steep approaches, and water temperature. Ultimately I’ve settled on Assam (the maltier the better) steeped once for four minutes with boiling water as my preferred variety.
But I use the term “preferred” loosely, because I find the taste of tea to be hugely inconsistent. Two cups brewed identically from the same tin can taste quite different on different days. I don’t know what to chalk this up to: Body chemistry? Lingering flavors from other foods? Hunger levels? Mood? Biorhythms? Different chemical makeups of different spoonfuls of leaves? I have no idea. And when you add in the fact that different tins contain leaves picked from different plants with potentially varied growing conditions, and have possibly been processed slightly differently (I don’t know how careful the oxidation timing is at a typical tea plantation), it’s no surprise that there can be significant variations in taste. Also, who knows if the Portland tap water I use is chemically consistent from day to day? And if you’re a barbarian like me who pollutes his tea with milk and sugar, both of which are eyeballed rather than carefully measured, well, all bets are off when it comes to any hope of consistent flavor.
This inconsistency is sometimes frustrating, but it’s not always a bad thing. It’s nice to have some surprises left in life. For every time that I go through the tea brewing ritual and end up with a disappointingly weak or off-flavored cup, there’s another time that I hit the jackpot with a magical combination of chemistry, time, and heat that generates a few minutes of sublime pleasure. That curiosity about how this mug will turn out adds a little spice to an otherwise routine process. Obviously there are a ton of life experiences that work like this (e.g., every human interaction ever), but for some reason I notice and appreciate this unpredictability the most with my twice-daily tea.
I wonder: do coffee drinkers experience the same thing, or is their experience more consistent? How about beer?
Cowell in Cascadia 