Grapefruit and Tea

I love grapefruit, and I love tea. Here is a red grapefruit that is one of many I've been purchasing for the wonderful price of 2 for $1 at the Newark Farmer's Market:



Grapefruit's Strange Interactions:

Grapefruit is a bit of an odd fruit, and it has strange effects on the body. There is a long list of drugs that are known to interact with grapefruit. Fascinatingly, and perhaps disturbingly, this interaction was discovered by accident, when experimenters used grapefruit juice to mask the taste of alcohol in order to design a controlled study of alcohol's interactions with a certain drug. In case anyone is interested, here's a link to the 1989 study (not public access). Since then, a long list of potentially dangerous interactions with many other drugs has been discovered.

I find this story disturbing because it highlights how very little is known about the interactions of modern pharmaceuticals with food and drink. Grapefruit is a common food, and its drug interactions are numerous and dangerous. Given that these interactions were only discovered by accident, it seems highly likely to me that there may be hundreds if not thousands of other such interactions with various common foods. This is one of many compelling reasons behind my skepticism towards the drug-heavy approach to medicine that sadly dominates the United States medical establishment, and my personal belief in using prescription drugs only when no feasible alternatives exist.

Grapefruit's Interactions with Tea:

Many foods can leave a lingering taste on the palate which can shape, and sometimes either enhance or spoil, one's appreciation of a given tea. I've found that, more than any other foods, grapefruit tends to have this effect. There are many teas whose subtleties are eliminated and which even become bland or tasteless if I sip them immediately after eating a grapefruit.

This morning, I am drinking hojicha. Hojicha normally has a pleasing roasted aroma, almost suggestive of coffee, and a smooth flavor, with some of the fresh green tea characteristics still remaining, especially in teas with a lighter roast. However, after eating my grapefruit and sipping my hojicha, I notice none of this. Instead I notice...guess what? Grapefruit, even though my grapefruit is long gone. And I also notice a muted, rather bland finish, that I can only really describe as gray like the sky. A faint hint of roast emerges at the end, but the grapefruit still leaves a tingle in my mouth.

Any recommendations of teas to try with grapefruit?

Perhaps grapefruit is best avoided before drinking tea. But if anyone has any recommendations of teas that are a good idea to drink after eating grapefruit, I'd be open to suggestions, and perhaps I can write about my experiences in the future.

Mild Tea - Brewing Tea Weakly

I was in the Newark, DE Farmer's Market today with my friend Jen, and we were looking at fruit, and she laughed as I remarked: "I love smallness." I had chosen the smallest grapes available--today, red grapes--and was eyeing a bag of very small apples longingly. Later, I picked up some mini-bananas:


When I got home, I brewed up a cup of tea, pictured below. It was Upton's Shou Mei Classic Organic (ZW23), one of my favorite white teas. The leaves of this tea are large, and take up a great deal of space. Upton recommends using 2-3 teaspoons of leaf per cup, and even this amount does not produce a particularly strong cup. However, I chose to use only a little more than one teaspoon of leaf, as I wanted a particularly mild cup of tea. It wasn't until I started sipping the tea and contemplating that I realized that there was a strange commonality between how I had chosen to brew the tea and how I had selected fruit earlier at the market.



Shou mei is dark among white teas. While this photo makes this cup of tea look rather dark for a white tea, this tea normally comes out much darker in color, like a dark oolong or lighter black tea. This cup of tea was extremely mild, even outright weak. But this is what I wanted. I didn't want the largest piece of fruit, nor did I want the strongest cup of tea; instead I sought the opposite.

There was little flavor; the aroma was faint, and was earthy and suggestive of autumn leaves, which adds an element of congruence to the photo above. And like the lighting in the photo, there's not much about this cup of tea that stood out; it was highly muted, mellow, and with a hint of warmth, like the reflection of the lamp in the window and on the mug.

Why? Why brew and drink such mild or weak tea?

I feel like I could write pages about the reasons for brewing tea exceptionally weakly, and I hope to write more about this topic in the future. The current culture in the United States is, in my opinion, one that glorifies excess and extremes, and I think this is a shame. While people across America are drinking 20 oz. lattes with extra shots of espresso, I'm drinking a very weak cup of what was an extremely mild tea to begin with. In some senses, I may be brewing my tea weakly, and choosing to write about it, as an act of rebellion against an aspect of American culture that I find unwholesome. But outside this deviant streak in my personality, there are numerous other reasons for my brewing choice that come to mind.

One phenomenon I have come to appreciate is how the subtleness of the aroma forces you to pay attention more closely to the qualities of the tea. I find this promotes mindfulness, which in turn promotes both mental clarity and physical well-being. I also like the noticeable but low amount of caffeine in a cup of weak tea. Spacing caffeine out over a long period of time, I find, promotes a calm alertness and clarity of mind, whereas having too much caffeine at once I find makes me feel "off", and beyond a certain point, actually harms my ability both to focus and to relax.

I can also drink more cups of weak tea than I can strong tea. In the winter, and on cold, rainy days like today, I like to drink hot fluids continually; brewing weak tea allows me to drink a lot more. And sometimes, I don't have a clear reason; I'm just not in the mood for a strong cup of tea.

Try it out.

Do you drink more tea in winter, when it's cold?

It's winter. Yes, I know that winter "officially" begins on the 21st, at the Solstice, but for all practical purposes, it's winter. The trees have lost their leaves, and it's been below freezing here in Delaware for several nights in a row. The past couple days we've seen some light snow flurries, and on my bird survey this morning the ground was frozen. This is a photo from Phillips park, where I do my local bird surveying:



It looks like winter now.

The migratory birds are all gone, except for an (extremely anomalous) late American redstart that came through in the third week of November. Now on my walk I see mostly the cold-tolerant birds: chickadees, juncos, white-throated and song sparrows, woodpeckers, crows, gulls, pigeons, starlings. Anyone who is curious to see the data from my survey can view it publicly, by viewing eBird's records for Phillips Park, Newark, DE. This may contain other people's records at all--I'm not sure--but I'm the main person contributing the data for this park at this point.

Do you drink more tea during the cold weather?

I do. Not by a huge amount, but I tend to drink a little bit more. This "more" often manifests itself in the form of drinking more teas that are good for multiple infusions, so that I can enjoy a few cups of hot tea during the morning instead of just one. I also end up drinking a lot more hot herbal tea in the evening. Since I can't get it fresh from my garden, I am less likely to drink mint and lemon balm; instead I drink more rooibos and tulsi. I love the sensation of a warm mug in my hands, especially when I come in from my almost-daily bird walk.

Color / Colour: Tea vs. Peppers

This post is inspired by reading a post about Tetley Colour Therapy Tea on Carol's blog Cha Cha Cha. A lot of times, when people think of color and tea, flavored teas and various blends come to mind, often including "exotic" ingredients like cornflower, which impart little flavor or aroma, but have a bright blue color. But, as much as I love herbal tea, for the most part, I tend to prefer pure teas over flavored ones, so I want to talk about the color of pure tea. And I want to talk about peppers.

I love peppers...sweet, hot, and anywhere in between, and I'm also still excited at discovering the incredible diversity of peppers at the Newark (Delaware) Farmer's Market recently, which is where these pictures come from. What in the world do peppers have to do with tea? I think peppers give a good illustration of what tea is, and what tea is not:


These peppers clearly illustrate how diverse a single species can become under cultivation. This highlights what tea is: tea is incredibly diverse. The tea plant, Camellia sinensis, comes in many cultivars, with different leaf sizes and shapes, each with their peculiar flavor and aroma characteristics. Furthermore, just like peppers can be eaten fresh, sun-dried, grilled, flame roasted, pickled, fermented, powdered, pureed, and/or put into all matters of food, the manner of producing the finished tea leaf is also highly varied, and also introduces another layer of variability.

However, the peppers also present a stark contrast to tea, highlighting what tea is not: tea is not intensely colorful. It is not neon orange like a habanero or bold red like a red bell pepper or ripe cubanelle, nor will you ever find any purple teas like a purple bell pepper. But you will find teas matching the pale green of the caribe and hungarian peppers, the dark green of the serrano, or the dark, almost blackish green of the chilaca, and you will find many yellow-colored teas, and many brown teas, with some tending towards a reddish hue.

Peppers are intense:

Not just in color, I think peppers are a perfect example of what tea is not. Peppers can be insanely intense. The inconspicuous, long, narrow, plain green pepper pictured on the right side of the upper-left corner of the picture looks subtle in color, but take one nibble and there is nothing remotely subtle about it: this is a cayenne pepper, and will inflict pain on the first bite. I've found that many people I know can't even handle dishes prepared with serrano peppers, which are several notches down on the Scoville rating scale that measures a pepper's heat. And the comparatively wimpy Jalapeno is still considered, for better or worse, a "hot pepper".

The Color of Tea?

The color of tea is interesting. Often, the color of the dry leaf of a particular style of tea is sometimes an indicator of quality, and a trained eye can pick out the difference and use it to select higher-quality loose-leaf tea. But the difference doesn't always stare you in the face: it takes time and experience to recognize. Similarly, I've found that if you brew a Japanese green tea with different temperatures of water, the cup comes out a different color. This change in color usually corresponds to a marked change in flavor and aroma. However, this phenomenon is also subtle, and requires attentiveness to spot: your cup is not going to start glowing bright orange if you brew your green tea with water that is a bit too warm: you might just notice it doesn't look quite as golden.

So while I like the way a hot pepper can grab you from the first bite and not let go until the end of the meal (or well afterwards), I also like the way tea takes a little exploring before you experience all the different elements of it.

Decaffeinated Flavored Teas: Why Not Just An Herbal Blend?

I'm both a huge fan and major advocate of loose-leaf leaf, and I will jump on any opportunity to guide casual tea bag drinkers in the direction of high quality loose tea. It's no secret that part of my agenda behind creating RateTea is to draw in people who may have only ever tried the mainstream brands of tea available in the supermarket, and show them what the world of loose tea has to offer. But I still feel compelled to write about the mainstream brands from time to time, and now is one of those times.

The other day, I sampled Bigelow's Decaffeinated Constant Comment for the first time. This tea made me ask myself the question: Why? Bigelow's normal Constant Comment is, in my opinion, the best of their flavored teas, and I also think their Orange & Spice Herbal Tea is decent. These three teas are all quite similar, and as I wrote in my review of the decaf Constant Comment tea, I have a hard time understanding why someone would choose that tea over the caffeine-free herbal orange spice blend, which has a very similar overall profile but is bolder and more flavorful.

It's no secret that decaffeination processes extract flavor in addition to the caffeine. Decaf flavored teas tend to be better than decaf pure teas for the simple reason that the flavoring can be added or blended in after the decaffeination process has been carried out, thus leaving the additional flavoring intact. But...given how bland most decaf tea is, if you really want to avoid caffeine, why not just drink an herbal blend based on the flavoring or whatever herbs have been blended in, without any tea?

I guess, everyone has different tastes, and I'm sure there are those who really do like something about the flavor or aroma that decaf tea has to offer. But this is my own personal preference, and I'll continue to only sample these decaf teas out of curiosity, not because I really enjoy them. (Although I am still open to being proven wrong, something that has yet to happen.)

A Double Tea Leaf

Sometimes, when plants grow, for whatever reason, two leaves fuse together. I found this while brewing an Alishan Oolong from the Taiwanese brand Tradition tea (my review), and I thought it was interesting enough to photograph and share:


Notice that the two leaves have separate veins, but are fused together in one leaf. The effect is the appearance of a lobed leaf, with two separate points.

How often does this happen with tea leaves? It's the first time I've noticed it in a couple years of drinking a fair amount of whole-leaf tea, and I regularly handle used leaf teas because I always compost the used tea leaves. But it could be that it happens pretty often and I just haven't noticed it before.

One thing I love about nature is its diversity and unpredictable nature. Sometimes in our modern, western society we want to have everything look perfect, we glorify an aethetic of regularity. But I find this aesthetic, the aesthetic of control and uniformity, to be sterile and stifling. I like it when interesting things arise spontaneously, and I like to focus on them and appreciate them. I find beauty in the random, and the deviant, even when the distinctions are subtle, like this leaf that I almost tossed in the compost bin without noticing.

Thankful about Tea

Thanksgiving is a time for being thankful. I'm thankful about a lot of things, but since this is a tea blog, I will limit this post to gratitude that is somehow related to tea:

• I'm thankful for the existence/invention/discovery of tea and herbal teas in the first place. I'm especially thankful for these beverages because I'm not a big fan of sugary drinks, and tea and herbal teas are one of the few beverages that are truly not sweet.
• I'm thankful for the diverse and richly-connected community of people on the internet who are interested in tea, including the association of tea bloggers, the many other excellent blogs out there, the people I interact with on twitter, and the other online tea communities and websites.
• I'm thankful for the stunning diversity of pure teas, and the wonder of what one plant, Camellia sinensis, and years of human ingenuity and careful cultivation can produce.
• I'm thankful for the growth of interest and participation in RateTea, and all that I've learned about programming, writing, and interactive website design over the past year and a half of working on the site.
• I'm thankful for all the wonderful people I've been able to enjoy tea with in the past, and all the people I will drink tea with in the future. (Alas, I'm drinking some tea by myself as I write this post.)

Happy thanksgiving!