Friday Favorites - Tea Time!

I don't think I can call myself a tea connoisseur, but I do love a great cup of tea. I remember drinking tea from a very young age. We always had bags of Lipton or Salada in the house and I remember filling a cup with hot water, inserting a tea bag and waiting a few minutes before dumping several heaping spoonfuls of coffeemate (the powdered version, this was before the liquid stuff came out!) into it to make it more palatable. I couldn't stand the taste of coffee, but tea with coffeemate was pure heaven. Although I think I was more in love with the coffeemate than the actual tea. Anyway... The years passed by and I eventually stepped away from regular old Lipton with coffeemate and started to experiment with other flavors.

This brings me to my Friday Favorites post for this week - My Favorite Teas.

1.) My first foray away from plain black tea was English Breakfast. It was bold, it had a nice kick to get you going in the morning (yet didn't leave me shaky like a cup of coffee usually does) and it went great with almost everything. It became my morning perk when I started working oh...back in high school sometime.

2.) I tried Earl Grey next and by this point I was starting to wonder what took me so long to step away from Lipton. That stuff was nothing compared to the overwhelming aroma of bergamot in a good cup of Earl Grey. I'm convinced of this one fact though, either you love the smell of bergamot or you hate it. There is no in between. And I happen to love it.

3.) Hubby caught on to my desire to try new teas and ended up coming home one day with a cannister of Alghazaleen ceylon tea from a co-worker friend. And when I say cannister, I mean CANNISTER. That thing lasted us several YEARS! But it was fantastic and my first adventure into loose leaf teas. Up until that point, I had only brewed the bagged stuff. Let me tell you though, I don't think I could ever go back to the regular bagged stuff now that I've tried the loose leaf varieties (except for a particular green tea and for obvious reason - more on that later.) This particular tea was straight from Sri Lanka and I am desperately trying to find more of it. It apparently came from a speciality shop in NYC and I have yet to find an online merchant that has any in stock.

4.) When I first tried green tea I couldn't stand the taste of it. I think it might have been Lipton's version of green tea though. Which I now know tastes nothing like real green tea. But for years I took it off my "tea radar" and focused my love on only the black teas. All that changed when one of my co-workers resigned and I ended up inheriting her tea supply in her desk. In that little box were a few bags of China Green Tips from Tazo. It was love at first sniff. Since then I have to have at least two cups of this wonderfully calming tea everyday at work. And here I thought Starbucks focused only on coffees/lattes/mochas/etc. Little did I know I would be falling in love with one of their teas! As of right now, this is the only bagged tea I drink since it's a lot easier than dealing with loose leaf at work.

5.) I'm saving my absolute favorite tea for last. Sometime last fall, hubby visited a speciality herbal/tea shop and came home with yet another gem (among a few not-so-nice gems - more on those later.) I have now found a new tea to love - Imperial Velvet Oolong. It's a wonderful tea from Taiwan and it is described as having a buttery aroma with subtle floral notes. And trust me, it really does have a buttery aroma. It's like buttery green tea and I only wish hubby had gotten me a larger container of this stuff cause I'm almost out of it. Instead he ended up getting a larger container of a different variety of oolong tea. A smoked oolong tea which has to be the nastiest stuff I've ever smelled. He claims he likes it. I think he's just saying that to push my buttons. Opening that container is like unleashing the aroma of wet smokey grass clippings. Blech. I'll stick to my imperial velvet thank you very much!