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Your cup of tea

Take the leap and change how you steep

If you use a bag to make your tea, beware – culinary poobahs will throw you in with those gauche and misguided souls who still drink instant coffee.

No matter if you paid $10 a box for premium white tea from China or green tea from Japan or a delicate fruit tisane from France. Suddenly, anything less than a properly warmed pot fitted with a steel strainer and poured into Grandma’s china is hopelessly uncouth.

Who knew? Belated British etiquette has now arrived on America’s shores, where some of the great unwashed still linger, ignorantly steeping their morning beverage with nothing so complicated as – aghast! – boiling water and a plain paper bag.

Will those of us with a drawer full of tea bags and a cupboard of mismatched cups have to slink out of town? Will we be forced to turn in our Tetley’s for loose-leaf oolong? What’s a lifelong tea-bag user to do?

Tea is second only to water as the most consumed beverage in the world (take that, coffee snobs) and one of its most ancient. Originally grown in the Far East, where billions of Asians still drink it every day, early Americans sipped their share, too. Many a tea pot and brewing accoutrement can be found in the earliest depictions of American life.

Fast forward to the 20th century and the invention of the tea bag. Needless to say, our tea brewing prowess went to heck. And while no one can deny their convenience, experts question the quality of the tea inside.

Starbucks, that enormous American chain of coffee correctness, has adopted the tea-pot approach, phasing out tea bags since buying the Teavana chain two years ago. No more Tazo bags for us lazy tea slobs, no matter how lovely the sweet orange herbal is.

“If we’re offering such high quality coffee, we should offer high quality tea,” said Durango Starbucks store manager Thomas Twitchell. “It’s the next evolution of at-home beverages.”

So says Twitchell – but it’s darned hard to cart a teapot around in your backpack. As a halfway step between commercial tea bags and full-on tea ceremony, experts recommend making your own. The kind you fill yourself are twice as large, inexpensive, not treated with chemicals and allow the hot water to flow freely around the leaves.

“A leaf can’t give you its gifts if it’s tied up,” said Michael Thunder, owner of downtown’s White Thunder Tea Room. “It’s like someone who can’t dance.”

You can, of course, use a tea ball or spoon, but nothing can stand in for tea properly brewed in either a pot with a mesh strainer or the traditional high-end coffee vessel, the pressoir, says Thunder. (He sells both.)

To make his point, he rips open a tea bag and pours its contents into a shallow bowl, where he denigrates its texture – chopped – and quality – despicable – to say nothing of the fact that it has no aroma at all. Add that you don’t know how old it is (like food, tea is best used quickly), and well, what more can you say?

Even Keiran Brock, a 15-year-old habitué of the tea room and budding tea connoisseur, can speak to the superiority of pressoir-brewed tea.

“It’s not bitter,” he says with the in-the-know confidence only a teenager possesses. “It’s the best.”

His favorite, for the record, is the green cloud mist, an earthy, smoky Chinese green tea that will keep you awake for days. But Thunder offers every tea imaginable in its natural leafy form, from hearty senchas to perfumed peach blossom to jasmine pearls, the most divine leaf ever to hit water.

Black teas have twice as much caffeine as oolongs and even more when compared with green and white teas. A trick to reduce the kick is to brew a pot, throw out the liquid, pour fresh water in and steep once more. Tea has less caffeine per cup than coffee, but it can still be more than you want at the end of an evening.

For anyone going eschewing caffeine altogether, Thunder also sells herbal teas. They’re not tea at all, but dried fruit and flowers, delicious and with no need of sugar. For a tart and spicy wake-me-up cup, try his tangerine ginger, loose leaf, of course.

Beyond its eastern allure and simple tastiness, tea offers a plethora of healthful qualities. The Chinese use it to cure everything from hives to asthma. U.S. doctors are discovering its usefulness slowing the growth of cancers, preventing clogged arteries, limiting high cholesterol and reducing the risk of neurological disorders.

Even Durango’s coffee-crazed public has taken notice, leading to more sales of loose leaf tea at Durango Coffee Co. The rise in local tea consumption is a confluence of factors, says the store’s owner, Tim Wheeler, with people wanting a healthier hot beverage, a marketing push exploiting tea’s inherent healthful qualities and Americans rediscovering an ancient, but not terribly popular, drink.

He, too, touts the better end result of tea brewed from fresh leaves rather than from a bag, which generally are comprised of the detritus dropped from the best leaves during processing. If you’re ordering a cup in-house, Wheeler prepares it in a pot with a strainer; if you’re ordering to go, he fills a bag with fresh leaves to take away.

Thunder brews his tea in a pressoir, taking a small sniff and a sip before he pours you a cup. For a tea bag addict, it’s hard to admit, but the same high-end tea you buy in a box from a health food store tastes twice as good when Thunder brews it for you from fresh and fragrant leaves.

His expertise plays a part – he did a stint as a monk in Japan, after all – but if the British can do it, surely we can. Herewith, Thunder’s tips for the perfect cup:

Use fresh leaves, which can be discerned most simply by their pungent smell.

Heat the water to the right temperature for the tea you’re making. It varies, but for many teas, boiling water will make a bitter brew. Check the bag for directions or ask at the store.

Steep for the amount of time recommended for your tea type – tisanes can take up to eight minutes to be ready, black teas, less than four. Too much time and you’ll end up with an acrid mistake.

“If you’re a hedonist or a person who enjoys pleasure, then this is for you,” he says speaking of fresh brewed tea in general, but taking a long whiff of the deeply aromatic matcha, once believed to be the brew of the gods.

Not even a tea-bag devotee can argue with that.

phasterok@durangoherald.com



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