A Delicious Cup of Tea

I drink too much coffee so I switched to tea.

Even before my first cup, I felt superior to my coffee drinking friends. No more coffee breath for me.

I scooped the tea (oolong, of course), and couldn’t help comparing the new me with that nervous and jangly guy from before. Goodbye sleepless nights and sewing machine leg!

It was time to claim my rightful place among the great and peaceful tea drinkers of history. George Orwell. Ghandi. Winston Churchill. Ozzy Osbourne.

I reached for my exquisitely designed Japanese tea pot, considering the heft of the cast iron and admiring the detailed imagery. When drinking tea, you see, the experience is just as important as the beverage itself. No tea drinker worth their salt would prepare tea in an appliance, let alone one that uses plastic discs as a brewing method.

I set my pot on the stove, turned the heat to medium, and told Alexa to start a four-minute timer.

Four minutes is, of course, the exact correct time to steep oolong. Yet for tea, this is considered on the lower end. Some teas need days or even weeks to achieve their complex flavors.

Meanwhile, coffee brews in mere seconds.

About two minutes in, eager for the first cup of my new identity, I smelled something exquisitely strange. It was tea. That much I could tell. But it was something else, too. Mesquite-like.

Had I purchased a flavored tea by mistake? What an odd flavor for tea, I thought.

By now there was smoke, but it wasn’t dangerous smoke. It was warming smoke. Harmless, it wafted through my kitchen on a beautiful fall afternoon. 

But then the smoke didn’t stop. Only then did it occur to me it should have been steam, not smoke. I rushed to the stove, grabbed my beautiful pot with the hand-crafted bamboo handle, and moved it off heat.

In all the fuss, I’d forgotten to add water. The house smelled like toasted tea.

Even worse, upon realizing that I’d likely burned my new tea pot, I removed the lid in a most unmindful way and succeeded in giving myself a well-deserved burn to my left hand.

The night I turned 21 years old, I went to the Kowloon restaurant in Saugus, MA and drank too many Kamikaze mixed drinks (vodka, lime juice, triple sec) where I promptly threw it all up in the parking lot.

I have never had a desire for a Kamikaze mixed drink again.

I now feel the same about oolong tea.