confessions of a tea blogger (i've been tagged)

{ Laura Marie Meyers, will you please stay indoors for a change? }  

I HAVE BEEN SHAMED into writing on The 39 Steeps again by a certain tea blogger (Cinnabar, I'm lookin' at you). Baby, it's cold outside, so I'm stuck inside with two increasingly inert children, so I'll play.

confessions of a tea blogger

1. First, let's start with how you were introduced and fell in love with the wonderful beverage of tea. At University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, a couple of events came together. I was near the delightful Walnut Street Tea Company, at a time I was struggling badly with asthma symptoms. Walnut Street had Darjeeling. They had oolong. They had Russian Caravan. They had the basics, which introduced me to the world beyond Lipton's. And I discovered that, for whatever reason, the constant tightness in my chest from asthma eased somewhat when I drank tea, even though coffee had no such effect. It didn't stop me from drinking coffee (that came much later), but it did feed my curiosity and convince me that perhaps tea could be interesting.
2. What was the very first tea blend that you ever tried? Constant Comment, by Bigelow. it was enjoyable, and part of discovering that tea wasn't disgusting. At that time, I drank coffee and tea in all their flavored varieties, particularly in one of UI students' favorite restaurants, the Courier Café. I spent many, many hours there, drinking Chocolate Soufflé or Hazelnut Delight coffee blends. And there, I first sat across a table from Suzanne Virginia Gonzalez, who would one day become my wife. I had never believed in love at first sight, even while I was experiencing it myself. Only in retrospect did I realize that she had me from the get-go. Now our four-year-old daughter is interrupting every other sentence, and I'm trying to write around her snowed-in craziness. What does that have to do with tea? Well, tea was there, and I was there, and Suzanne was there. And lurve was there.
3. When did you start your tea blog, and what was your hope for creating it? I live for those moments when I experience something new. No, let me rephrase that: something enjoyable and new. A poke in the eye with a red-hot spork would be new, but it's not on my bucket list. That being said, I had shifted my drinking habits from coffee to tea at some point, and I found on Facebook a delightful group of tea drinkers, titled "A Cup of Tea Solves Everything." While I don't quite agree with the aforementioned sentiment, I did enjoy the opportunity to discuss tea with my friends. As a sort of online journal, I started writing reviews there as a way of keeping track of what I was learning about tea, so I could go back and buy more of what I loved, and also to help other readers with their tea journeys. At one point, the group was shut down for a week or so, and I panicked: All my reviews were gone! When it came back online, I made a blog, copied-and-pasted as many of my reviews as I could find, and The 39 Steeps was born. From there, it took on a life of its own.
4. List one thing most rewarding about your blog and one thing most discouraging. I was quite surprised that anyone would even read a blog written by me, being such a narrow niche interest, and because I am just some guy with an enjoyment of tea and a computer. Most disappointing was that once you start a blog, you have to keep the blog running, and that proved difficult when I ran into some personal difficulties and suffered from "major depression," which makes regular writing difficult if not impossible. I hate disappointing people, and disappearing for months and years at a time on a blog is truly a self-defeating cycle that only makes it harder to write.
5. What type of tea are you most likely to be caught sipping on? I live, love, and breathe fist-flush Darjeeling. The complexity and brightness are incomparable. That being said, as my tastes change over time, I'm finding myself drawn to impossibly complex high-mountain oolongs from China and Taiwan, or puerh when I can afford it, or many other single-estate, orthodox teas.
6. Favourite tea latte to indulge in? Well, I don't, sorry. I don't have an espresso maker at home (because I'm a recovering coffee addict, and it makes me into a crazy person to drink it), and drinking tea out of the home is almost always a losing proposition. I do like Thai iced tea, though, if that counts.
7. Favourite treat to pair with your tea? Silence and a book.
8. If there was one place in the world that you could explore the tea culture, where would it be and why? Taiwan. They have the craziest, most intense tea culture in the world, and I'd love to sample it. But I'm most likely to actually visit the Himalayas, Nepal and Darjeeling, because that's the center of my tea experience and the focus of years and probably a thousand gallons of tea drinking.
9. Any tea time rituals you have that you'd like to share? I love, love gongfu, Chinese style. As I see it, there are three predominant tea-drinking cultures in the world. There are others, but they are less well known and acknowledged. The British tea seems to me to be focused on the accoutrements and social aspects of tea, with a focus on doilies and who gets to pour from what type of teapot more than a focus on the actual tea itself, which is often flavored with milk and sugar to cover up the bitterness of the oversteeped tea. The Japanese have elevated tea drinking into a religion, and the act of making tea--the careful attention to every motion, every breath, every aesthetic aspect of the experience--can bring one into a meditative state conducive to living deeply. Chinese gongfu, on the other hand, is often messy, noisy, and terribly pragmatic. The 197 steps they take to make a cup of tea are there not for social, nor meditative, reasons; they're there to make the best freaking cup of tea they possibly can. And if it takes 17 gallons of boiling water out of a zisha clay kettle over a fire made out of expensive Japanese white charcoal, filtered with the tears of unicorns, into a teapot designed specifically for this tea and this tea alone, then they'll do it. For the tea. How could I not fall in love with that?
10. Time of day you enjoy drinking tea the most: morning, noon, night, or any time? I find myself making tea whenever I can get a quiet moment to myself. It's best when other people are around, so I can share discoveries with them. Now that I'm a high school Literature teacher, I have been sharing with other teachers and my students, which makes everything taste better. In a way, drinking tea has been much like teaching Beowulf: unlocking the fun and beauty for people who otherwise would go away without knowing the good stuff is out there, just waiting for us to delight in it.
11. What's one thing you wish for tea in the future? Two things, or maybe three. I wish for an American audience for the good stuff, which will make it possible for me to actually go out of my house and get a decent cup of tea. Since TeaGschwendner went belly up in my area, I can't find a cup of tea worth drinking that's within easy driving distance. Second, I wish for better, more sustainable growing practices, which are careful of our stewardship of the environment and the welfare of the people involved in producing the tea we drink so happily. And thirdly, I WANT MORE TEA! Running low in my cabinet is the pits, and it makes me feel bad when I don't have it in my budget to go buy the stuff I want. 

SORRY! I just don't have someone to tag. I'm like that, I'm afraid. Thank you for reading, and I hope to have more content to pop up on this baby every once in a while.