OSP Tea! #2 Weird and wonderful

Now for the interesting tangents… Tea is pretty cheap, as a commodity (according to indexmundi tea has sold for just over US$2 p/kg for the last couple of months), and depending on where you buy your tea, one cup could cost US$0.09![1] What?? Even if you pay US$10 for a 2oz bag of loose leaf tea, which is on the more upscale end, it only comes out to US$0.55.[2]

On the other hand, nothing special ever stays absolutely accessible. One of my first wanderings into the tea world, I had to search out the most expensive tea… and it coincided quite conveniently with the weird and bizarre things people do to set their tea-drinking apart from what may be considered plebian. First-off I do not consider it a special kind of tea experience when there are golden flakes brewed among the tea leaves! That’s just bizarre and says nothing about a love of tea, rather more about a personal lack of authenticity. With that mini rant out of the way… There is a tea that embodies both decadent indulgence as well as adventurous daring! 🙂 This is the kind of beverage that, were I to be blessed by its ingestion, I don’t know whether I would brag about drinking a US$200 cup of it, or to just keep to myself what it is I’ve spent that much cash on… It is o.O panda dung tea.[3]

Photo Credit: 熊.陈美芬.Phan Ly Photography.On/Off via Compfight cc

Unlike the civet coffee where the animal actually eats and poops out the bean, in this case the tea fields are fertilized with panda dung. Actually, that’s not so bad… An Yanshi, the guy whose idea this is, calls it environmental, organic tea in the spirit of recycling and using waste in positive ways. Whatever floats your boat, man 🙂

OSP Tea! #1 Basics

Aaah, tea… A good cup of tea always makes me feel like my soul (whatever that is), is taking a deep, relaxing sigh. Soothing, like a soft, deep blanket; the process of brewing and drinking tea is usually the chance I take to stop… breathe… and remember to slow down. Other than this enjoyment I get and a half-glanced label saying ‘China’ somewhere on the box, I know very little about something that gives me so much pleasure. This is where my eclectic explorations have brought me – to the mechanics (or organics;) of tea.

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Origin & context:
Much to my surprise all tea comes from the same plant – Camellia sinensis – so you get black tea, white tea, oolong, green & pu’erh tea from altering the myriad steps in between picking the tea leaves and shipping it out. Wikipedia has a nice article about tea processing that even has a diagram on how to get each kind of tea out of the Camellia sinensis leaves. This means that some of my favourite teas (rooibos, mint, ginger tea, etc) are strictly speaking not tea, but herbal infusions. Meh 🙂