Today is National Tea Day. I enjoy a good cup of tea, so it was nice to discover that. But it’s mostly a U.K. thing. There are other Tea Days. Two International Tea Days. One is in May. One is in December. Not that there is a bad day to have a cup of tea. It just makes it confusing to try to celebrate Tea Day.
If you are into tea, you probably realize just picking which tea you might want can get confusing. There are a lot of different teas you can choose from. Black teas, green teas, red teas… lots different teas. Almost too many teas.
Let’s just take what most people would think of us your standard type of tea; orange pekoe. Orange pekoe is not orange. It does not make orange tea. No one seems quite sure where the name comes from. It could be a bad English translation of a Chinese term. Or it might have something to do with the Dutch East India Company, who helped make tea popular in Europe. But orange pekoe is not a type of tea. It’s actually a grade of black tea.
You can get orange pekoe, flowery orange pekoe, golden flowery orange pekoe, tippy golden flowery orange pekoe, even finest tippy golden flowery orange pekoe. They’re all a type of black tea, just different grades. And that’s for whole leaf tea. You can get different grades for broken leaf tea.
I used to like to try different teas. Most times I couldn’t really tell one from another, but it was fun to pretend.
There are also those who seem to attach far too much ritual to making tea. One person I know used to insist that water must be boiled for five minutes at a rolling boil. I used to try to tell him that it still only gets to two hundred twelve degrees before it turns into steam. Didn’t matter. It had to be boiled for five minutes.
Milk had to be added to a cup first, then the tea. I think it was something about scalding the milk, but this is a cause of some debate in tea circles. I’m not sure it really matters, except to the person performing the ritual of making the tea. And milk is really best used in black teas to smooth out some of the tannins.
There are a lot of different teas to choose from. I generally like an Earl Grey tea, myself. Without milk. Just let that little hint of bergamot smooth the taste. But I won’t turn down a good old cup of orange pekoe.
In many ways, it’s a comfort food. I think my first cup of tea was given to me by my grandmother. There may also have been one or two of her homemade cookies along with it. But there was always a tea pot on the back of her stove. Just in case someone dropped in.
