Sweet Tea & Iced Tea Recipe Contest

National Iced Tea Month (June) is almost upon us, so get your pitchers and ice cube trays ready.

Sweetened tea may not be to everyone's liking, but in the South it's as much of an institution as it is a drink. Here's a sweet tea article from the Associated Press, by way of the Cincinnati Post. It comes complete with recipes for Southern Sweet Tea, Iced Apple Tea, and Southern Blackberry Iced Tea.

If you'd like to do the iced tea thing without caffeine, try this recipe for Rooibos Sun Tea, from Camden's Courier-Post.

If your own iced tea recipe is particularly noteworthy, Bigelow wants to know about it. They're sponsoring an Iced Tea Recipe Contest in honor of Iced Tea Month. Your entry must make use of at least two types of Bigelow tea. More info here.

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Fairtrade Tea

As I've mentioned before in these pages, the people involved in the production of your tea are not always well compensated or treated. In hopes of improving this situation, Unilever, the company that owns Lipton, recently announced that they would be obtaining all of their tea from sustainable, ethical sources. Read more at Forbes.

For information about a Fairtrade tea initiative on a much smaller scale, check out this article, from the Somerset County Gazette, about some English students who have launched their own brand.

Finally, here's an article from one of the South African papers about the connection between tea and slavery.

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Arizona Tea Rooms & Pu-erh Article

It's getting to be that time of year in Arizona when you can boil water for tea just by sitting it outside for a few minutes. Okay, maybe that's overstating things just a bit.

But if you're in Arizona and you're looking for somewhere to go for tea, the Arizona Republic has a list of 14 stops in Phoenix and the surrounding area.

If you're concerned that green, black and white teas are hogging the media spotlight, cast your eyes upon another article/review about pu-erh, this one from Montreal's Gazette.

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Tea Review 85 - Chinese Breakfast Tea

Chinese Breakfast Tea
Numi Tea

If you want to lay your hands on high-quality tea, you're probably going to have to mail order it. Unless you're fortunate enough to have a good tea shop in your general vicinity. I'm not.

While I do a good bit of mail ordering, I also got to thinking recently that it would be nice to have an "everyday" tea of at least passable quality to fill in the gaps between orders. But given the selection in grocery stores around these parts (central PA), I had almost despaired of finding such a thing.

I reviewed Numi Tea's sampler pack a while back, but I picked another one last week, in hopes that there might be something therein that would serve as an everyday tea. And what do you know - their Chinese Breakfast seemed to fit the bill.

Numi's Chinese Breakfast is made from 100% organic, full-leaf Yunnan tea (in a tea bag) - the packaging and Web site don't say whether it's a blend or a single estate variety. In any event, it's a very dark tea, even though I steeped it for just under 2.5 minutes, less than the 3-5 Numi recommends.

The next thing I noticed, after the color, was a nice, sweet aroma that was so strong that I could smell it without even lifting the cup to my nose. The taste didn't disappoint either. I've been drinking a lot of green and white teas lately, so it could just be that I was primed for a good shot of black. This was a welcome change of pace and one that I'll be keeping on hand from now on. I've also got my eye on Numi's Breakfast Blend, so stay tuned.

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Blair Grumbles About Tea

From time to time someone steps forward to bemoan what's said to be the declining state of tea-drinking in Britain. Back in late 2005, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Starbucks was tempting Brits to give up their cup of tea in favor of you-know-what. For another take on the same topic, see what ABC News had to say earlier this year.

The latest person to fuss about the state of British tea is the soon to be former primer minister, Tony Blair. In an interview with NPR, he agreed that it was impossible to get a good cup of tea in London. He also confessed that he drank coffee when in mainland Europe, due to the general lack of tea-making expertise there. For the BBC's take on things, look here.

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Tea Miscellany

Here's an assortment of tea-related stuff that I thought was worth sharing.

Adrian Newbould comes right out and admits it. He's (she's?) a tea snob. Read the sordid (not really) confession here.

Jim Leff's CHOW Tour Dispatch #66: The Enchanted Misty Mountain of Tea and Excrement is worth a look, though it's as much about food as it is about tea. Read it here.

Here's an interesting page about Chinese green teas from Noble Harbor. It's extensive and very informative. Which seems especially timely since I've sampled several nice Pi Lo Chun varieties lately.

From Tea News From Darjeeling Area, here's a page about the history of tea in that region.

From London's Times, comes an anecdote about President Reagan and an embarrassing moment he had while hosting the Prince of Wales. What to do with one's tea bag, indeed.

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Now Drinking - Snow Buds White Tea

I reviewed Rishi's Snow Buds white tea a while back, but I thought I'd put in another plug for it. My wife picked up some for me last week at a Wegman's store, which apparently has a fairly impressive selection of tea.

I'm generally of the opinion that, with tea, you get what you pay for. But if you're looking for an "everyday" white tea that's not going to break the bank (1.3 ounces for under $10) you could do a lot worse than Rishi's Snow Buds white.

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Even More Of The Tea In China

Here's an assortment of tea news that's come out of China recently.

First up is an article called A Tale Of Flower Tea, which profiles Xue Tongyun, a Chinese tea producer.

Tea historians tell us that tea originally made its way to Japan from China. Here's an article from Asahi.com that tells about how some Japanese tea merchants are trying to turn the tables.

Liangcha is apparently quite a popular herbal tea in China, though nowhere in this fairly extensive article do you get much of an idea of what it's actually comprised of.

Last up is an article about how a tea drinking theme will be part of the 2008 Olympics, to be held in Hong Kong.

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Matcha Angel Food Cake & FoodView

The Coconut & Lime site posted an interesting recipe for Matcha Angel Food Cake yesterday. If you're looking for some sweet stuff with a little bit of pick-me-up, I guess this would be the one.

For those of you who might be looking for a big whopping bunch of recipes that use tea, look no further than the FoodieView recipe search engine. A search for the keyword "tea" brought back 18,534 results, which should be enough to keep you busy for a while.

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Newsweek Discovers Yerba Mate

There's a new tea in town, or so they'd have us believe at Newsweek, which recently ran a brief article about yerba mate. If you live in South America, where yerba mate's been all the rage for quite a long time now, you might find this sort of thinking a bit odd. But here in these good old United States I guess yerba mate could still be thought of as new.

The article suggests that we should "forget green tea" (no, thanks) and reveals that yerba mate is the new "it" drink. Well, then.

Read the article here.

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Is Tea Bad For You?

Update
It might be time to throw out your green tea and replace it with yerba mate. Or maybe not. Although research at the University of Illinois indicates that yerba mate might contain higher levels of antioxidants than green tea.

My recommendation - keep drinking green tea and start drinking yerba mate too. Or stop worrying about your health so much.

More about yerba mate and green tea in this article from the university's student newspaper.

Original Post
With all the reports about the wondrous things tea drinking can do for you, it's a switch to read one about tea's alleged dark side. Not that I put too much stock in what these reports have to say, one way or the other.

According to this article in Yahoo India News, Rutgers University researchers have found that tea may cause chromosome damage and fetal leukemia. Both of which are no laughing matter, of course.

The article is a bit confusing and I didn't have much luck tracking down the actual research data, but I gather that you're only at risk for these conditions if you're taking tea-based supplements and the like. Plain old tea drinkers apparently don't have much to worry about.

As always, I'll be drinking my tea with little concern for any health benefits or lack thereof. I encourage you to do the same.

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Tea & Dental Hygiene

Hot water is also very hurtful to the teeth. The Chinese do not drink their tea so hot as we do, and yet they have had teeth. This cannot be ascribed entirely to sugar, for they use very little, as already observed; but we all know, that hot or cold things, which pain the teeth, destroy them also. If we drank less tea, and used gentle acids for the gums and teeth, particularly sour oranges, though we had a less number of French dentists, I fancy this essential part of beauty would be much better preserved.

The women in the United Provinces, who sip tea from morning till night, are also as remarkable for bad teeth. They also look pallid, and many are troubled with certain feminine disorders, arising from a relaxed habit. The Portuguese ladies, on the other hand, entertain with sweetmeats, and yet they have very good teeth; but their food, in general, is more of a farinaceous and vegetable kind than ours. They also drink cold water, instead of sipping hot, and never taste any fermented liquors; for these reasons, the use of sugar does not seem to be at all pernicious to them.

Jonas Hanway (Essay on Tea, 1756)

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New & Interesting Tea Products

Here's an assortment of interesting tea-related junk I ran across over the course of the past few months.

Save Your World is the first personal care products company in the United States to launch a 100% natural personal care product line infused with a unique blend of organic Yerba Maté and organic Aloe Vera under the brands Save Your Skin and Save Your Hair.

While we're on the subject of yerba mate products that you wouldn't necessarily want to drink, have a look at Kiehl's mate-based skin care products, including lotion, toner and cleanser.

Eva Solo's Teashirt (pictured) is a tea maker that gets big points for looking spiffy, though I can't personally vouch for how it works.

Nor have I tried Tzu-Thé's T-Buddy. It looks like it might be a useful solution to the problem of drinking good tea on the go, although I'm not real keen on the notion of drinking tea from a plastic container.

ForLife (FORLIFE? For Life?) also offers some eye-catching teaware as part of their Cafe Style line.

Then there's Liquid Planet, which was referred to us by a TGS reader. They carry tea, teaware, and all manner of other nifty beverage-related stuff.

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