9 things you should unlearn about tea

"Americans more often drink our tea instant and iced"

While the "iced" part is true, the instant part isn't. Most people who drink iced tea in the south and southwest want it fresh brewed and that's how most restaurants serve it, with the exception of a few fast food chains.

Pretty good article, although I have to say the plug for ML is interesting. I find that online boutique tea companies like zhi are much better and offer more variety than national chain brands like ML.

And I also disagree with the decaffeinating tea part. My co-worker did an analysis a couple years back on this very thing and found that 80-90% of caffeine was indeed removed after a 3-4 minute steep.

DS

Sunny-brewed tea has always been the choice in my household during summer months.
When the sun doesn't cooperate we brew it, let it sit and then put it in the fridge.
Instant - anything, is for those who prefer things like Spam and other disgusting food-substitutes.

Those Starbucks tea lattes are only syrupy if you don't ask for it unsweetened. It's milk, water and tea, to which you can then add your own sugar. They are still much better than the Argo tea-pucinos which are made with already brewed (and in the case of the last one I had, old) tea and milk.
My British tea-making skills also dictate that milk is added after the bag has been removed and not before - lowering the temperature of the water with the milk affects the brewing of the tea.
You also forgot to mention the disastrous effects green tea will have on the color of your teeth, the main reason I stopped drinking them!

this article brought to you by Starbucks and Mighty Lea Tea. Now back to the movie>

Right on about restaurants not getting the tea thing right. I love how they want to refill the hot water but never provide a new tea bag. Diluted tea is useless!

Thoughts on Argo: Their tea is tasteless, lukewarm bordering on cold and overpriced. The servers could also use a lesson on tea.

To greatly increase EGCG from green tea, use bulk green tea leaves, like gunpowder tea, put the leaves into a $10 coffee bean grinder for 2 or 3 minutes, then make your tea. Throwing away the tea bags or leaves is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Also I've heard that lemon juice allows more absorption of EGCG.

As an expert in food intolerance/allergy, many clients who come to see me are frequently exacerbating their symptoms by drinking herbal teas. For example, for someone who has a ragweed allergy, drinking chamomile tea is the worst thing you can do. Chamomile is in the ragweed family and thus acts as a cross-reactor.

That article is a little misleading. There are many studies in human models demonstrating anti-cancer benefits of EGCG.

http://cat.inist.fr/...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19105967
http://carcin.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/...

TeaCozy wrote:

Thoughts on Argo: Their tea is tasteless, lukewarm bordering on cold and overpriced. The servers could also use a lesson on tea.

Not to mention astringent to the point of tasting extremely bitter. I've been told by management that they brew all teas at 175 degrees. Intelligentsia stores (which is primarily known for their coffee) brew a much, much better cup of tea.

It's just extremely disappointing to go to a place where tea is their central product and they get it so wrong. The fact that they are proliferating only confirms my suspicion that most Americans have no idea how badly they are getting it.

"High Tea" is not the elegant tea some would have you believe it to be. "High Tea" is called "high" because it was taken at a "high" table, like a pub table, or sitting on boxes during a meal break for the working class. "Low Tea" is what High Society is famous for, being conducted at low formal tables, in drawing rooms, parlors, out on the lanai or in the garden, with fine china, linens, dainty finger sandwiches, elaborate pastries and sweets.

how can they sell decaf tea?

Interesting to say things are false, when the current status is "unknown" or "lacks sufficient evidence."

I'm surprised at the amount of inaccuracy in this article and some of the comments. For example:

Rooibos is most often made from the leaf of the plant, not the seed.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooibos )

High Tea origins has nothing to do with the height of the table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tea#cite_no... )

De-caffeination has been researched by industry leaders like Nigel Melican, whose research is quoted my website (http://walkerteareview.com/... ) and the original article (http://chadao.blogspot.com/2008/02/caffeine-a... )

Tea does contain health benefits, and I would hope that we can each find teas that we can enjoy on a regular, daily basis.

Jason
walkerteareview.com

Nice plug for Todd & Holland. They have an excellent selection and can find something for just about anyone. All their tea is loose, but they sell handy disposable pouches and more traditional strainers.

Good stuff, bu not quite true, not quite false on the first issue of types of tea. Yes, there are only three types of tea, and they are all from the same plant, with the primary difference being that of fermentation levels.

What you fail to mention, however, is that within each major division of type, there are hundreds of different styles and distinctive flavor profiles. Think beer or wine as a reference. A few major types, but a virtually endless spectrum of flavors within that. Maybe this is specificity beyond the intended scope of the article, but it shouldn't be.

Poor effort on the exposition of the first point as it really does matter.

Debunking is easy. Clarification is better.

"Tea bags are low brow"

False! My wife loves tea bags.

Here's a novel idea: How about doing research before you write an article!
Green tea has on average HALF the caffeine of black tea.
http://www.stashtea.com/caffeine.htm
Besides that your article was full of holes and fallacies.
Idiot. It's a shame people are actually going to read this article and believe you.

Contrary to the others opinions here, I thought your piece was ballsy and informative.

Others here report the health benefits of tea, but few of them bother to point to long-term clinical studies in humans that measure tea drinking. Most studies mentioned here follow doses of ECGC much higher than someone could absorb from drinking tea daily. It's one thing to administer high doses of ECGC directly into cancer cells in a petri dish. It's something else to show that ingesting tea helps cancer.

I basically gave up on this article having any good info once they name-dropped Celestial Seasonings. Worst "tea" ever, if you ask me... There's some awful flavor in their base mix of tea that just ruins everything.