GEMINILOGGBOOKOBERDADAISTICUS

What tea boils down to

Is tea preparation a ritual or a routine? You know that you're asking an addict?

Tea bags apparently emit microplastics. Besides, the sortiment available in bags is limited, and they don't taste as good as loose leaves. And OP is preferable to BOP.

During the four years when I had a reasonable and regular income I used to frequent a really exclusive tea shop, an international chain that had just planted their first two outposts in my city. Now I think only one of them remains. They had some very good varieties, all kinds of black, green, white, fermented, flower decorated, organic, Nepalese, Georgian, Kenyan, ten year olds, expensive, and super-expensive sorts of tea. They used to demonstrate the Japanese manner of preparing Oolong, you had to have special equipment and be quite pernickety about temperature, quantities, timing, how to pour water, and so on. Then they would prompt you to buy their tea ceremony equipment and take their tea ceremony course.

They usually had three or more qualities of every main sort of tea, such as Yunnan or Darjeeling, ranging from tasty and almost affordable to the most exquisite and expensive. You have to understand Veblen's point of conspicuous consumption. The higher the price, the better it's supposed to taste. Well, I came to other conclusions and preferred a cheaper Yunnan which was kind of thick and muddy to their most refined sort which was thin and pure. I think the shop keeper must have been on a mission to educate the customers' taste. At the same time, it was impossible to distinguish that possible mission from a marketing strategy, to hook up customers on luxury teas. They used to offer discounts if you carried a special member card, but then they dropped the card and made the system digital. They would collect email addresses so they could assure that their customers remained hooked, but at that point I had gotten a bitter taste of their overdone customer stalking and stopped visiting them.

Tea doesn't grow where I live, so it has to be imported. Nowadays I use to get 1 kg bags of large leaf Ceylon tea, which last for a few months, maybe half a year. It's cheap and of surprisingly good quality. We live in exciting times, and if the geopolitical situation spirals out of control it might have consequences for tea availability too, although at that point there would probably be even more serious things to worry about.

I got a little bag of herbal tea from a witch I know. She had collected some medicinal herbs and added a bit of black tea to the mix. I'm not exactly sure what effect it has on me, supposedly it would induce happiness but it doesn't. It's probably very healthy.