Truthful Tuesdays Volume Eight

• Posted on June 9, 2015
• by Jamie Stahl
• in Truthful Tuesday
• 2 Comments.

This Week’s Truthful Tuesday:  It’s Tea-rific

After being on the planet for approximately 28 years and 9 months, I’d have to say that I am fairly new to the world of tea drinking.  It’s only been in recent years, oh let’s say the last 5 or 6 that I’ve actually found a taste for tea.  The majority of my life was spent hating tea while secretly being jealous of people who liked tea.  “Jealous of tea drinkers,” you might ask?  Because it looked like such a fun and civilized thing to do in the movies!  I wanted to be able to “have a spot of tea and crumpets” with the best of them.  But, no matter how many times I tried, I just didn’t like it.

Growing up, whenever I would get sick, I would drink a lot of apple juice to flush out my system.  Solely because it was the only thing that wouldn’t upset my stomach (aside from water, of course) that my tastebuds would allow to enter my body.  While in elementary school, my younger brother, by almost 4 years, would drink tea like a boss.  I remember thinking it was really weird and that he seemed like such a grown up.  I can’t tell you how many times I had been offered a cup of tea, to just try it, I might like it this time, try this flavor, it’s good for you, it will make you feel better… At some point, I made the decision that I just did not like tea and that there would be no future tea consumption occurring.

Years had passed, at the very least all four years of high school and a couple of years into college, until I really felt “pressured” to try tea again.  This was because I was preparing to spend a semester abroad studying in London, England.  My friends and I talked about how excited we were to live in London for 4 months and without fail, all of the famous places that we needed to have tea.  I figured, of all the places in the world, I’m bound to find tea that I like while I’m in London.  It would be so magical if I could end this paragraph sharing how much the tea in London changed my life and how delicious it was; however that wasn’t the case.  I tried tea a bunch of times in different flavors, with milk, without milk, with sugar, without sugar, with honey, without, etc. (you get the point).  While I did manage to sip some here and there, I had much better luck with coffee.

While at home, I participated in two different “tea-tastings.”  The first one, did not go very well and I maintained my stance on not liking tea.  A few months later, something very strange happened and I somehow found myself tasting teas again.  This time, it was different.  I liked it!  Here’s the best part… I had never liked tea before because it was never strong enough!  It always tasted like dirty dishwater to me, no matter the flavor.  I just wasn’t keeping the teabag in the water long enough for fear that I wouldn’t actually like the flavor of the tea and it would be too strong.  I know! I know!

Since then, I’ve been drinking tea.  I don’t have a wide palette of tea flavors, I just like Chamomile and Green Tea, but tea is tea!  Depending on the size, I will usually add 2 or 3 packets of sugar and I let the teabag sit in the cup for eternity.  In my opinion, the stronger the better.  This is really one of the few times in my life that I have tasted something on multiple occasions and did not give up on wanting to like it.  Being such a picky eater, I usually try to stay far away from foods (or drinks) that I haven’t liked in the past.  So, I guess sometimes there is a lesson to be learned in trying something new.  I recently tried Matcha Green Tea, and I liked that!

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