My teammates at work spoil
me.
When we have team
meetings, one of the women with whom I work makes us all tea and hot
chocolate. One of the other women on my
team has a drawer in her kitchen that is filled with all kinds of exotic teas,
and she brings some of that tea in for me to add to our school tea
collection. I keep sugar and honey in my
classroom, as well. Between us, we have
some great meetings – tea to calm us down when needed, caffeine to ramp us up
when needed.
I decide that I should
probably contribute more than the usual standard tea bags, so I dig through my
stash. I have various English and Irish
teas, and I also have a bunch of other kinds.
I try to decide which ones I might want to keep here at home and which
ones I might want to contribute to the team stash.
After vacillating over my decision, I suddenly
have a brainstorm. I grab three mugs
from the shelf. I decide to make three kinds
of tea: Earl Grey, pumpkin spice chai,
and Christmas tea. I’ve tried each of
these numerous times before, but I cannot remember much about them other than I
enjoy them enough to keep the tea bags. The
only way to decide this conundrum is to have a tea taste-off.
After boiling a full point
of water, I set up my tasting station along the counter. I drink my tea black with one sugar, so I set
up each cup with a different tea bag and with a spoonful of sugar. I don’t wait for the whistle of the tea pot
this time. As soon as I see the steam
wafting out, I start filling the mugs.
The smell is
instantaneous. My kitchen is suddenly
filled with the aromatic scent of steeping tea.
I stir each mug slightly then leave them all for two minutes to do what
tea bags do. By the time I come back to
the counter, I still haven’t decided which tea to sample first. I eeny-meeny-miney-mo the cups and get down
to business.
First up is the pumpkin
spice chai. Being a pumpkin spice fan, I
like the tea, but I’m not a huge chai fan, at least not in a traditional
sense. I always understood chai to be a
milk-based tea, but I never put milk in my tea and consider it a bit of a
sacrilege. The tea is just fine by
itself; its smooth taste is almost flat but not unpleasant. It smells peppery with its combination of
cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice.
Oh, and pumpkin spice. After all,
it is pumpkin spice chai.
The second mug is full of
steaming Christmas tea, which might sound like peppermint and candy canes, but
it’s actually spicy, with cinnamon and cloves.
It reminds me a little bit of my tooth extraction because the socket got
infected, and I had a pack of clove oil stuck in it for a week. I breathed cloves for days, even after the
packet came out. The Christmas tea
smells like regular tea but tastes mild with a spicy kick.
The last one I try is one
of my favorites, the Earl Grey. Sure, it’s
a classic tea with its own legend, but it’s not quite plain old regular
tea. It has the bite that a good black
tea should have, a little kick in the pants both aromatically and
tastefully. It has a hint of bergamont
flavoring, an orange extract made to imitate more expensive Chinese teas. I hold the mug in my hands for long moments
while sipping.
I feel like Goldilocks,
trying out the three teas to see which one I will finish and which I will
donate to Team Tea Time. One tea is a
little flat. Another is sort of
peppery. But the Earl Grey is just
right.
I’ll bring the tea bags to
school with me and share them. I know my
team spoils me, but maybe I can spread a little of the love with the fancy
teas. After all, if I love them all
enough to try out three teas at once here at home, I surely love them enough to
share the experience with them at work.
