Coffee Break Has Been Cancelled
Bad news. I am subbing in today, and I have decreed: No coffee today! Everyone gets tea instead.
Actually, I don’t get tea. As in, I don’t exactly understand it. This winter I started drinking it after my morning coffee because it’s hot, has zero calories, and generally has much less caffeine than coffee, so I can drink a whole pot without really noticing.
But if you ask me, beyond the difference between green and black tea, I just can’t say much. I never notice whether it’s Earl Grey or Irish Breakfast, whether it’s from a teabag or pot, or whether it’s brewed with boiling water or just hot. Dump a ton of spices in like Chai, I’ll notice, but otherwise it’s all the same.
But I realize there are many people who are different, and tea is a basic part of life in much of Europe and Asia. I’ve known English people who treat drinking tea as something that’s as basic as wearing clothes or taking a shower.
So take a tea break today and talk about whether you drink it, and what you think about it. Green, black, or herbal? Hot or iced? Sugar, milk, or lemon? Do you belong to a tea culture that always has a cuppa? Or was it only for when you were sick with a cold, with a splash of lemon, honey?
Or, if you have other non-coffee drinks to help you get through the workday — Diet Coke, mushroom broth, buttermilk, now’s the time to spill.
I like Long Island iced tea but that’s the only cold one I drink. Good Chinese hot tea is good with a meal. I don’t know the difference either between all of them but I like a ginger & lemon one when I’m sick.
Long Island Iced Tea, aka raid the parents liquor stash and hope they don’t notice….
Tea for me, too, once coffee is done. And no, I can barely detect any difference between flavors, and I don’t care — we had a whole revolution to free ourselves from tea. I’m pretty sure that was the reason.
During the pandemic I put on about 15 pounds because at home snacking is so easy, and inexpensive if you’re not relying on a vending machine.
When I used to go to work in an office, though, rather than chomping down a candy bar, I’d make tea. No sugar, nothing added (actually, I drink coffee black too). It gave me an excuse to get up, take a break, ingest something, and not actually consume calories.
Once I decided it was time to drop a few, I bought tea for home. Now I make a cup instead of snacking. Mostly. Work in progress, baby steps, all that.
The process of making and drinking it seems to be enough of a distraction until mealtime that it makes it easier to skip a snack, even if it’s not nearly as satisfying as a snack.
It’s also a really easy way to get myself to drink more water. I don’t care that it’s caffeinated and flavored, still counts!
I drink iced green tea when it’s hot here, but that’s really about it. I’d rather drink decaf coffee than tea.
I’ve always admired the Churchill diet.
https://historyofyesterday.com/how-much-did-winston-churchill-actually-drink-9d05218940d
I love the quote “did not drink as much as he was commonly thought to do” which is then followed up by a completely wild consumption of alcohol.
That must come out to a dozen drinks a day?
That’s a huge amount of alcohol every day, at least from my perspective. “Didn’t drink that much” is clearly relative. If I did that, I’d sleep most of the day. And be dead in a year at the outside. Dude lived to be 90, though. I guess he worked up to that consumption level and his body adapted to it.
He would have been 24, maybe 25 at the oldest.
But he came from one of the noblest families in Britain, the Spencer (as in Diana)-Marlborough-Churchills, and Britain was at its height of empire, so how else would one travel?
Churchill was born at Blenheim in 1874. Blenheim is one of England’s grandest houses and has 187 rooms spread over 145,000 square feet. It’s just outside Oxford so it’s much nicer than those castles and palaces spread out in more remote and inferior parts of the green and scepter’d isle.
But if those 12 drinks are mostly very weak whiskey and sodas and then champagne by the bottleful I understand what that means. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the slightest bit tipsy from champagne even though it’s as alcoholic as any other wine. I think it’s because it’s really unpleasant (for me) to take a mouthful, so you just take little sips.
I love hot tea and I drink 3-5 cups a day. I like a strong breakfast tea. The tea shop near me has an Irish breakfast tea and a Scottish breakfast tea and the Irish one is almost subtly malty. The Scottish one is more robust, but really both are fantastic. I also love a good oolong because they are partially fermented and get a rich flavor.
Noticing the subtle notes in tea for me comes down to a few things – good quality tea, decent water for brewing, and drinking it black. And the water quality really matters – hotel tap water when I’m vacationing is not nearly as good for tea as the tap water I have at home. But if the hotel has a filtered drinking water tap available? Much better tea.
Not to say that I won’t happily brew a cup of Lipton if that’s what’s available, but I prefer loose leaf teas.
Also in the summer I have a marionberry infused black tea blend that I make sun tea from and store in the fridge and it’s ridiculously refreshing.
I’m glad to know some people can pick up on things I completely miss.
I think it’s also because I don’t drink coffee or beer. Or wine that much.
My completely nonscientific opinion is that everyone has a food or beverage area where they notice taste variations that other people completely gloss over. Like someone can talk all about the flavors of a beer and I’ll take a drink and be like “welp, this tastes like beer.” I have second cousins that pick up on all sorts of details with wine where my unrefined palate categorizes as sweet, kind of sweet, not sweet at all, bitter, bubbles, no bubbles.
Meanwhile I will talk someone’s ear off about tea including that one black tea I tried that somehow tasted like sweet potatoes and I hated it.
Cinnamon tea, spiced tea…sometimes I just prefer it over coffee (not often, but frequently enough to keep it on hand.).
Thanks for subbing, great Coffeeless Break!
I’m not a big hot tea drinker. But Harney and Sons makes a blend called Paris that I like. I do like iced tea in the summer but not the abomination known as sweet tea.
Sometimes a little sugar helps cut the tannins when the tea has sat too long, but too much of it is as sweet as flat Coke.
I can tolerate tea if I have to, but not if it has bergamot in it. I don’t mind bergamot in other things, but Earl Grey is nasty.
I love the tea they serve at Cantonese Dim Sum restaurants. It’s strong and cuts right through all the grease so that I can continue my gluttonous consumption of all dishes on offer. I have no idea what it is. I’ll ask my mom and get back to you (for those interested).
I do not drink coffee – only tea and water. Loose leaf English breakfast in the am. Later in the day in a really big mug – I usually brew a mix of hibiscus/pomegranate green tea/echinacea with lemon – let it sit to cool and then have it over ice for the rest of the day – usually makes two glasses full. I also like a mix of peppermint tea with licorice root tea. I don’t like normal licorice flavor but the tea just adds a little bit of sweetness to the peppermint. Don’t drink a lot of licorice root tea if you have heart problems – it adds potassium and can cause an irregular heart beat.
I drink other blends but I won’t bore you with them.
I always get a little suspicious of herbal teas because of issues like that one with licorice root — who knows what Big Chamomille Syndicates are really up to? Hooking the kids, no doubt.
No coffee or tea except Chinese Green Tea.
I’m the weirdo who rarely drinks coffee at work even in the era of rotating shifts.
I like the smell of coffee and that’s about it.
In my junior engineer days, I was tasked to make the coffee which was a mistake. I either made it too strong or too weak (a scoop is a scoop) so a cranky elder took that job away from me because it didn’t make any sense that the non coffee drinker had to make the coffee. For a while I was called Yemana after the Barney Miller character known for his awful coffee.
ill drink tea…if theres no coffee to be had..just regular tea flavoured tea…
but really…i live off coffee and cup a soups