I've been thinking about tea a lot lately.  Perhaps it is in anticipation of the cool weather because I tend to drink a lot more tea in the cool months than I do in the warm months.  But I've also been seeing more articles, discussions and information about tea recently than in the past.  I think this is a good thing.  Tea is often underrated compared to coffee.  Don't get me wrong I love coffee but I also really enjoy tea. But as with coffee the tea must be good tea - no Lipton tea bags here.

For quite a while now I've been buying my tea from Simpson & Vail , a specialty tea supplier that has been in business for 75 years.  While some new popular tea shops have recently appeared,  I really like the large number of tea choices and unique tea accessories Simpson & Vail provide.  They also tend not to be as overpriced.  I lean towards drinking straights rather than tea blends.  It's not that I don't like blends but I think instead it's that I don't feel I've explored enough tea to have gotten to the blending stage yet.  Case in point is that only within the last year did I stumble upon white tea which is my current favorite.  Until last year I was primarily a Black tea drinker, with Assam dominating the list, and loved to add both milk and honey to the tea.  Looking back I see this as more of a coffee substitute than a real tea experience.  Not that I'm knocking milk and honey in tea but that recently I've really grown to enjoy the tea on its own and with black tea I still feel I have to add to it to enjoy it. So in pursuit of less added sugar I started exploring green teas.  My favorite green tea to date is Dragonwell but that's probably only because the white tea has me so obsessed that I haven't really tried many more green teas after my order of white tea arrived.  This is probably my loss because I also have Silversprout and Gu Zhang Mao Jian green teas in the house right now and I imagine if I gave them a chance I'd probably really enjoy them.

So what is so good about the white tea?  I'll give you my perspective in a minute but first I'd like to point you to a recent article I found by Richard Romando on White Tea which describes white tea and how to brew it.  For me the sweet mellow taste of white tea is what I most enjoy.  My current favorite is Pai-Mu-Tan from the Fujian province of China that has an elongated leaf with white tips and gray-green leaves.  One thing I've seen raised a few times is the cost of white tea.  I'm not sure I agree.  The Pai-Mu-Tan white tea I buy from S&V is $2.05 an ounce and the most expensive white tea S&V currently sells is $10 an ounce.  So while some of the high-end whites can be more money you can find reasonably priced and very good white teas.

An issue I have with both white tea and green tea is how it is brewed. For green tea it is critical, to avoid a bitter taste, not to boil the water.  While I haven't found a bitter taste in white tea when boiled its flavor does change  and so the water for white tea should also only be heated to 175 to 185 degrees.  This is an issue for me because I use one of those automatic water boiling pots.  These are great but if you don't want boiling water you have to stand and watch it to stop it before it boils.  So my current dream small appliance is a water heating pot that lets you specify the temperature you want the water.  I know I probably have very little chance of it coming to market soon but hey if everybody starts drinking white tea demand will increase and maybe my dream will become a reality.  In the mean time I'll go watch the water boil and then enjoy my pot of white tea.