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Tea and Tea Culture: Difference between revisions
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{{Useful Notes}}
{{quote|''This is the biggest, most important thing to know: '''For a black tea, you pour boiling water on tea leaves.''' That's ninety percent of the art of making a decent cup of tea. (...) It's the final ten percent of the cup of tea that you'll get people calling each other heretics for adding the milk (not cream) first, or whether to use teabags or loose tea and whether burning in effigy or a nice box of chocolates was the correct reward for whoever decided adding bergamot oil to tea was a good thing, or all the other tea things that people like to argue about.''
|'''[[Neil Gaiman]]''', [http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2005/06/last-tea-post.asp blog post]. }}
''Camellia sinensis'' - the tea plant. According to legend, discovered in China by the first Emperor who was boiling water in his garden and had some of the leaves fall into it. Or, according to another legend, the first tea plant sprung from the eyelids of Bodhidharma, the monk who brought Buddhism from India to China, who [[Eye Scream|cut them off]] to prevent himself from falling asleep during a long meditation.
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* The American Revolution was set off in part by tea. The Boston Tea Party occurred due to Parliament assuming it could tax the colonies without their say so, although, ironically, the final straw was ''lowering'' the tax on tea with the Tea Act, making it cheaper than tea smuggled in or imported legally from elsewhere, upsetting the smugglers and merchants who weren't in on the deal, who were the ones who actually dressed up and threw the legal tea into the harbor, then convinced most Americans that they were protesting a tax ''increase''. Since most Americans bought from a smuggler (either directly or not) they had no clue as to what real prices were, so they bought the whole thing and followed the smugglers' lead. Consequently, the Intolerable Acts were enacted after several hundred pounds of tea were destroyed. The Intolerable Acts led to much chaos, protest, and generally warlike tendencies within the colonies. Soon, the British decided it was a good idea to seize the arsenal in Concord, Massachusetts. The result was the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which ignited the American Revolution.
** The reason coffee tends to be so much more popular than tea in America is mainly due to tea being associated with British imperialism - during the American Revolution, it was popular to give up tea in favor of coffee as a symbolic act of defiance, and coffee's popularity stuck. Of course, this really pissed off the tea smugglers that started the whole thing.
**Tea was the foundation of the glamorous (and sometimes criminal) maritime trade between the US and China in the
* Several towns in New England used to use to choose their new ministers with tea. An example of a loaded question, a candidate was considered too passionate for the job if he took his tea with both milk and sugar.
* Foreign countries (or for that matter, anywhere north of Virginia or west of Texas) are hell for a Southerner used to drinking iced sweet tea. On the other hand, Northerners are often put off by the amount of sugar in Southern sweet tea (one recipe that makes a sweet tea that is in the mid-range of sweetness calls for a 1:8 ratio of sugar to water), and usually prefer their iced tea to be unsweetened or fruit-sweetened.
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