Discovering loose tea

I’m a life-long tea drinker, having never developed a taste for coffee aside from the occasional iced, blended, super-sweet mocha thing from Starbucks, which is more like ice cream than coffee.  As a kid, I drank a lot of herbal tea, which is not technically tea but an infusion of leaves, berries, and spices from other plants.  I still like herbal teas, for an afternoon drink when I don’t want caffeine, or for their medicinal properties when I’ve got a cold.  Over the past few years I’ve branched out more and more into “real” tea: black, green, red, and white; chai and Earl Grey.  And I drink a lot of it, using at least a couple bags a day at work.

So I was excited when one of my tea-drinking coworkers came to my desk a few weeks ago and handed me a catalog from Special Teas, a company that exclusively sells loose tea in more varieties than I knew existed.  Their catalog held page after page of long lists of tea varieties, all sold in bulk ranging from 1/2 oz samplers to 1/4, 1/2, and 1 lb bags.  These guys do tea like some people do wine (though they try to be beginner-friendly with teas marked “staff pick” and descriptions like “great for the novice tea drinker”).  Even their descriptions have more than a hint of wine description in them:

Wuyi Green - The Wuyi Green grows high on the steep mountainside of Northern Fujian Province. Far below, the Nine-Bend River winds its way around the Wuyi Mountains like a great black dragon. This is the home of the fabled “monkey-picked” Oolong teas. We are delighted to offer this economical green tea. It is unusually full-bodied with a slightly wild taste and colorful character; an excellent pick for everyday enjoyment.

I love the overblown poetry of wine descriptions, so I had great fun reading through the catalog.  But even if you find the descriptions to be overdone, loose tea is worth some consideration.  Variety is always a plus, in my book, and the economy of scale is hard to beat.  This is one case where the DIY approach can save you a ton of money over time, especially if you drink lots of tea.  It doesn’t sound like it, but 1/4 lb is a ton of tea – at 1 tsp per cup for most of them, I estimate that 1/4 pound of loose tea makes as many cups as 4 or 5 boxes of bagged tea – and many of the prices are just $4 to $8 for a 1/4 lb bag.

They’ve got a good selection of organic teas, too.  I can’t find the source now, but I’ve read that tea is among the most important foods to buy organic, because it isn’t possible to rinse the pesticides off conventional tea as you would with most fruits and vegetables.  (Do you know if this is true, and I’m remembering correctly?)

With so many choices, I couldn’t decide what I wanted, so I got two 1/4 lb bags – one green tea, one rooibos – and a whole bunch of little sample bags of things that sounded interesting, along with a mug-sized tea filter similar to a permanent coffee filter.  Among my choices:

• Strawberry White tea (my favorite so far)
• Green Rooibos Organic
• Fine Ti Kuan Yin Oolong
• Raspberry Organic Fruit Melange
• Earl Grey de la Creme

I really like the ones I’ve tried so far, and can’t wait to try the rest.  I’m sure that once I’ve picked my favorites, I’ll be going back to order more.