About a month ago I decided to try switching from coffee to tea. There are great benefits from drinking tea, especially green and white teas. With coffee, not so much. Some people say they don’t want to give up drinking coffee because it helps keep them regular. That’s just an excuse to keep drinking it. I switched to tea and I’m still fine! Confucius says: “He who says he drinks coffee to stay regular is full of shit.” Actually I made that up, but it’s still just as wise.
One reason I hesitated to drink tea for so long was because I found it to be too bitter. Then I was given the best advice for drinking tea in the history of mankind: do not oversteep. I can’t praise that advice enough. In the past, I’d just keep the teabag or steeping ball in the cup the entire time I drank it. Five minutes of steeping some teas is equivalent to pouring viscous coffee sludge from the bottom of a coffee pot into your cup; it tastes awful!
I found the odd gadget pictured to the right that’s a … unique way of timing how long your tea has steeped. I mean, it looks cool and all, but this is the 21st century, folks. Sand timers are for olde Englishmen who sit by a roaring fire with their mates after a fox hunt, wearing a monacle and saying “pip pip” and “huruph!” That and children’s board games.
If you’re going to time your tea steeping — or anything for that matter — are you really going to sit there looking for when the last grain is going to fall? That’s right up there with watching paint dry and waiting for Seacrest to tell you who’s eliminated from American Idol. You’d be better off counting to 180-Mississippi for that three-minute steeping (300, tops).
So remember: Do not oversteep your tea and use something practical to tell you when to stop steeping — I use Cuppa at work. The difference between three and four minutes does matter when steeping tea! You’ll be a coffee convert too. No shit.
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on Jan 23, 2009 @ 09:41 EST5EDT
