Tea Tea Tea

 Much has been written about the perfect cup of morning coffee, especially the famed south Indian filter coffee, and about the modern coffee houses, the branded ones like Starbucks, coffee day, and many such.

But poor tea has no vociferous supporters to broadcast its position as the most brewed beverage and the most used drink in the world after water. But there were and still are people like C. S. Lewis who said " You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me".

Tea was once the mainstay of social interaction in the erstwhile British empire extending from Canada to Australia and New Zealand, but American influence and the marketing tactics of their MNCs led to the various types of coffee like Cappuccino, Americano, Latte, Espresso, plain black coffee, coffee with cream, iced coffee and many more.

But poor tea has remained just tea and tea alone till recently when a half hearted attempt has been made to market iced teas with different flavours like lemon.

Tea is an evergreen shrub, Camelia sinensis which if left to itself can grow into a tree but is generally trimmed to be maintained at about 2 metres height to facilitate manual plucking of its leaves. Camelia sinensis has two varieties; the subtype sinensis or the Chinese tea plant and the subtype assamica or the Indian type.

It is from these two varieties that the various types of tea like the green tea, yellow tea, white tea, oolong tea, pureh tea and black tea are produced. The various types of tea are obtained by adopting different types of processing procedures on the leaves.

Usually the leaves are plucked early at dawn to prevent the warmth of the sun's rays from changing the organic chemicals in the leaves. Traditionally the two topmost youngest light green leaves which have small fine downy white hairs on its undersurface is plucked along with the bud. The leaves are just dried for making green tea and they are steamed and pressed for producing the regular black tea variety. As the leaves get more mature and darker green there occurs chemical changes in the leaves leading to changes in flavour.

Tea is said to have three characters, namely, colour, flavour and body.

In India the Assam tea is known for its strong body, while the Darjeeling variety is famous for its subtle, delicate flavour. It is the nilgiris tea of south India that has a balanced flavour and body and hence tastes the best. The higher the altitude of the estate the better the variety grown in India. Tea is grown extensively in China, South and Southeast Asia and upto Cornwall and Scotland in the UK.

Tea contains quite a good amount of caffeine, about 4%, and also throbrome, just as coffee.

But while drinking the quantity of caffeine consumed may be less because the leaves are traditionally discarded after the decoction is brewed for a few minutes though it is perfectly safe to consume the leaves too.

Personally for me my morning cup of tea is the most indispensable and mandatory vitalising agent and I brew it myself. We get tea leaves (not dust) from the Kolukkumalai tea estate from the tea gardens on the slopes of Kotaguddi hills on the western ghats where tea is grown at a height of 6500 to 8000 feet above sea level. We prefer the flowery orange pekoe variety as it has the combination of colour, flavour and body suited to our taste. I usually use one tablespoon of leaves for each cup and add one extra spoonful for the pot. Boiling water is added, mixed with a spoon and the pot is quickly closed with a lid and allowed to brew for three minutes. We should not think that brewing it longer makes the tea stronger. It only makes it more bitter. To make stronger tea add extra tea leaves. Meanwhile milk is boiled freshly. Big tea cups (not the fancy ones holding 50 ml or so), ones having a capacity of about 200ml or more are taken, the decoction is mixed once again and when it settles filtered into the cups. Milk is slowly added, after removing the floating cream, and mixed till the desired colour is reached. As a connoisseur I do not add sugar. That tea when tasted in the cool quietness of the morning with the sun's early rays just appearing, with the loud chirping of the birds from the coconut, mango and neem trees in my garden, and the high pitched squeaks of the squirrels running up and down the trees as I sit at the dining table and lovingly look and appreciate the quarter century old neem tree just outside our gate makes the most ideal beginning of my day which later becomes one full day of meeting patients with their various aches and pains, deformities and injuries, wounds and scars, physical and mental trauma, cries and sighs, and it offers my only solace for my entire day.

I remember my undergraduate days when there were at least three tea shops around our college. The one most proximate to us was the Nair's tea shop inside the men's hostel campus from where the boys used to get their tea, coffee, cigarettes, biscuits, and small snacks like samosas. It used to be crowded always with one asking for a glass of tea, another a bottle of cooled drink, jostling with yet another lighting his cigarette from a small kerosene lamp with a thin strip of cigarette case cut like how the chefs make juliennes of carrot, and another helping himself to a biscuit or samosa. There were a few boys who were seen more often at the shop than at the wards or in the classrooms.

The second one was on the Poonamallee high road, opposite to our hospital, and because it is open from 4am to 11 pm, we used to visit it during our internship night duties, for our last tea of the day at around 11pm and the first one of the next day at 4am.

The third one functioned from a disused car shed opposite to our medicine block named the Dr. Guruswamy Block. It was patronised by the lady interns, PGs and assistant surgeons as it offered some privacy being within the campus. The shop keeper used to serve special tea and coffee to the students and doctors for a extra price of half or one rupee, and it used to taste good and better than the other two.

Tea making is an art and not all can reach the nirvana state of perfection in this art. This is one of the reason why coffee shops have multiplied and become more popular nowadays as the connoisseurs of tea would not drink a cup of tea outside their home fearing to risk tasting a brew of lesser grade than the one they are used to. They would prefer to have a cup of coffee than taste a cup of badly made tea.

George Orwell published an essay in 1946 detailing the method of making the perfect cup of tea and the eleven cardinal rules to be followed in the process. These include,

1.Tea is best made in a tea pot made of porcelain or ceramic or an earthenware pot. The pot should be washed only with plain water after making the tea and discarding the remnants. Soaps and detergents should not be used. And it should be dried in sunlight.

2.The tea pot should be preheated.

3. Good quality tea leaves from India or Ceylon should be used.

4.Tea leaves should be put into the pot. Usually one tablespoon each for a cup of tea and one extra spoonful for the pot.

5. The pot should be taken to the kettle and not vice versa and the boiling water should be directly poured into the pot. Some people especially the ones who advocate green tea as a health advisory ( though green tea doesn't appear to offer any extra vigour or confidence except a sour face on account of its bitterness) say that the water should be heated only to about 70* C when the first small bubbles start to rise from the bottom of the vessel, as according to them boiling the water renders it devoid of oxygen thereby reducing the taste.

6.Tea should be strong and should have a good body to taste apart from flavour.

7.Tea should be put directly into the teapot. Tea bags and using muslin cloth to tie the leaves alter the flavour of the tea.

8. Tea should be consumed generously from a cup of considerable quantity. A good breakfast cup would be ideal.

9.The milk used should be free of cream. Too much of cream would render the tea thick sweet and creamy.

10. Decoction has to be poured into the cups before milk is added to it and not vice versa.

11.Lastly tea should had without sugar. Some people say that it is bitter without sugar, but it is meant to be bitter. The same can be said of beer too. Nobody adds sugar syrup to beer. The mild bitterness has to be enjoyed. It is an acquired taste but can be cultivated.

Tea, especially the high tea of the Victorian England, when the sun never set on the British empire was famous throughout the world. The elaborate ritual of English ladies and gentlemen, sipping cups of Darjeeling tea, in their dainty little china cups, holding them between their thumb and the index and middle fingers, their ring fingers curved and their little fingers extended and not touching the cups were a familiar scene in most of the well to do families. Accompanied by thin slices of bread toasted to perfection and buttered, small slices of cakes, and buttered hot scones they made a substantial meal. This was such a vital meal of the day that Wilkie Collins wrote, " My hour for tea is half past five and my buttered toast waits for nobody ". As the sun began setting over the empire the grasp and hold of tea over the society gradually declined ,accentuated by the scarcity and rationing of food products during the second world war. But what is lost in this social turmoil can be gauged from what Henry James wrote, "There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as the afternoon tea ". This was coupled by the emergence of the USA as a major economic force in the world. The American MNCs marketed the Brazilian coffee available to them at low cost and made coffee a dominating brew in recent years.

There are a few things which have to be mentioned before ending. In India it is common to see people sipping tea from the saucers but this practice is abhorred elsewhere around the world. Most of the commercial tea packaged and sold in our market are blended tea and dust tea which are of teas of different types blended to give a standard color, body and flavor. But just as a connoisseur of whisky abhors blended whisky and opts for the single malt, a tea aesthete would not opt for commercial tea blends but would choose a particular variety of leaves from a particular estate.

Thus though tea packets are cheaper than coffee in the market, and tea is cheaper than coffee in the roadside stalls and in hotels, there are people like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the famous Russian author who said " I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea