My grandparents kept a yellow tin of Red Rose tea bags on their counter. The tin was fairly large and was embossed with the word “TEA,” and there were similar tins for “COFFEE,” “FLOUR,” and “SUGAR.”
The two of them would occasionally share a cup of tea in the mornings, each served in a classic teacup with a saucer beneath. I remember my grandfather would remove the bag after steeping and place it on a ceramic coaster that featured the text, “I HOLD THE BAG.”
My first memories of tea were from those mornings with my grandparents. They both seemed to enjoy the ritual (and the beverage), and they were generous enough to sate my curiosity one morning by offering me a small amount in my very own cup. I relished the opportunity and remember feeling particularly distinguished and grown-up to be drinking a hot beverage at the table with them, but alas, the smell and taste seemed unpleasant to me as a child. It was bland and bitter and fell dull and flat on my palette.
The only tea I had at my parents’ was in the form of Lipton’s powdered iced tea mix, which I do remember enjoying with sandwiches and chips for lunch, but calling this tea at all is kind of generous; it’s basically just brown sugar-water. Snapple’s Peach Iced Tea was a go-to as well, but this is just brown sugar-water that comes in a glass bottle and has a slightly fruity taste and a whimsical fact on the underside of the bottlecap.
Sometime in my teens I started drinking bottled, sweetened, green iced tea when the family my parents often camped with offered it as an alternative to soda. I doubt it was any healthier than soda, but they seemed to feel good about it, and even though I found it positively revolting, I forced myself to acquire a taste for it just so I could have something to distance myself a little further from my parents. Camping trips were tense.
I started drinking hot tea more on my own around seventeen or eighteen. I don’t fully remember my motivation to try it, but I have a hunch it had something to do with some combination of British TV and Tumblr.
This ushered in a period of experimentation, during which I was entirely clueless. I had no idea what I was doing, and nobody to help guide me through my journey. My mother drinks exclusively scalding-hot, black, instant coffee, and my father’s masculinity—at least at the time—proved too fragile to even humor the idea of drinking tea.
Aimlessly, I selected a handful of boxes of tea in grocery stores that seemed appealing, but since I didn’t know what what I was doing, I let marketing influence my decisions, which went about as well as one might expect. Berry sounds fun. Lemon? Okay. That sounds like a tea thing. Variety boxes? Yes, that seems like a reasonable way to help me identify my preferences.
These were trying times for me and my identity as an aspiring tea drinker because my mom would absolutely call me out for claiming to like tea while practically refusing to drink any of the garbage that was cluttering up her cabinets. Unfortunately, I have no choice but to cede that point.
Eventually, however, I got my hands on some earl grey and some green tea (which may have been flavored; I can’t recall). Despite my affinity for British programming at this stage in my life, I didn’t particularly care for having milk with my tea, though I was in the habbit of adding a spoonful of sugar to help sweeten things up. Of course, this probably wouldn’t have been an issue if I hadn’t kept the bag in my mug the whole time to become increasingly bitter with every passing moment — over-extracting tea by brewing it too hot or too long throws the brew off balance by releasing too many tannins than we find palatable, which contributes astringency and bitterness.
College helped me refine my taste a little bit more and I began omitting sugar. I had my first experience with Lapsang Souchong when my college girlfriend, Emily, dropped an unfamiliar-to-us variety of Twinings teabags into our cart on a whim when we were feeling adventurous at the Wegman’s grocery store. Back in my dorm, we excitedly broke the plastic surrounding the box and were immediately greeted by an overwhelmingly smokey aroma that neither of us were prepared for; we bought the tea from name alone, and had no idea that it’s dried over smoking pine for its distinct flavor. The armoa seemed strong, but oddly alluring, and after our first sips, and we unoriginally likened it to drinking a campfire (but in a good way).
This time period in college happens to coincide with my highest activity on Twitter, so I can cross-reference some memories with dates.
On May 5, 2012 at 2:17PM, I was sitting in a dorm room with Emily. I don’t remember which of us brought it up, but we decided to have tea, and I don’t think I played it cool. Then, she said what might be the sweetest thing anyone has ever told me: “I like those moments in the middle of the day when you remember that tea exists.”
On August 20, 2012 at 3:42PM, I remember sitting at the wooden table at my rustic office in the State Park where I worked. The family dog had just been euthanized the day before after we learned the poor thing was riddled with cancer. It still hurt to keep my eyes open and breathe normally, but I filled my Binghamton University mug with hot water and I tweeted, “Healing begins with Earl Grey.”
In late March, 2013, Emily and I were nearing the end of our relationship. Communication was difficult, tensions were high, and we had nearly split up a few times already. It was an early relationship for both of us, so neither of us had the experience to know it was time to move on, and naturally, when my parents invited the two of us on a road trip from New York to Florida during our spring break — “one last vacation as a family,” as it was billed — we accepted.
I still don’t know why we all agreed to it. Maybe we were all being too polite: my parents, my girlfriend, and me, all playing chicken with the expectation that, surely, none of us would actually go through with it. I nearly declined on Emily’s behalf when my parents proposed the idea to me over the phone, but I extended the invitation. I never would have dreamed Emily would accept, but she did. Maybe she didn’t expect her parents to let her, but they did. Perhaps we all selfishly wanted credit for a nice gesture that someone, eventually, couldn’t possibly accept, but clearly we all went too far, and none of us was brave enough to go back on it.
A few days before we were due to leave, Emily and I had a fight walking from her housing community to the bus stop. I was insensitively badgering her about something, unable to comprehend why she didn’t want to do something that I enjoyed, which ended in her screaming, at the loudest level I had ever heard anyone raise a voice, “Because. I. FUCKING. HATE IT.”
I was stunned and ashamed and embarrassed (and in public). All I could think about was how badly I didn’t want her to go with me on the trip. But what could I do, I thought. I already invited her.
A few days later, somewhere in one of the middle states of the East Coast, I was sitting in one of the middle two bucket seats in my parents’ minivan with Emily to my right, my little sister in the back seat. Tensions were high, and Emily and I were both quiet. I think we had been fighting earlier before the drive, and Emily was either crying or quietly holding back tears. My parents stopped at gas station where we took a quick break to use the restroom and stretch our legs. I saw an opportunity for tea after seeing a red “HOT WATER” tab on the coffee machine inside the convenince store, and I excitedly lifted a large paper cup from the stack next to the machine. I felt inexplicably smug about walking out with this tall, warm cup for free, and even took a moment to imagine a scenario where the attendent might try to stop me.
“Are you going to pay for that?"
"Oh, this?” I’d say slyly. “This is just hot water; not coffee. It’s for tea, which I have supplied myself.”
The attendent didn’t even look at me when I walked out, which for some reason was even more exciting to me. Upon returning to the minivan, I began steeping a teabag of Lapsang Souchong and put in my earbuds. The tea was lifting my spirits a little bit, but I doubled-down and constructed a slightly more elaborate façade, tweeting something to the effect of, “Cruising down the coast with fresh air in my lungs, Dashboard Confessional in my ears, and Lapsang Souchong on my tongue.”
It felt like such bullshit for me to write something evoking a sense of freedom and adventure, all while Emily was miserable beside me, likely feeling trapped and stuck, almost certainly on the verge of weeping from exhaustion, sadness, and overwhelmedness, and definitely following me on Twitter. We broke up a few months later, and I’ve since deleted the tweet, but I still cringe at the thought of having authored it in the first place.
Months later on summer break from college, I took my rusty, red ‘96 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme on a day trip to visit a crush in another town and do some photography. I parked in front of a fire hydrant, which nobody ever told me was against the rules, and I received my first-and-only parking ticket. Unwilling to mail anything this damning from of my family’s mailbox, I needed to scrape together the twenty-or-so dollars and hand-deliver it to the local police station that afternoon. I remember considering making an emotional plea to the on-duty officer’s sense of humanity, perhaps taking him aside and slyly telling him, man-to-man, that I was actually hoping to use that twenty-something dollars to take a pretty girl to dinner, which I suspected might play better for me than taking her to her town’s local police station to pay for a parking violation.
Naturally, I chickened out and just paid the fine in full while holding back tears, feeling a deep sense of shame and guilt.
I remember afterwards, I was trying desperately to not let a slip of paper on my windshield ruin a beautiful day with someone I cared about. When we got back to her house, I asked if she had any tea, and she found a box of Red Rose Orange Pekoe tea in the cupboard. She playfully made fun of me because it was the middle of summer and incredibly hot and muggy, and we were in a house with no cooling or air conditioning, but she was kind enough to let me boil some water and drink a hot beverage, and to me, it made all the difference in the world.
A year or two later, I realized that I could buy loose leaf tea from the grocery store (or the internet) and put it in an infuser. It was one of those rare and beautiful situations where an alternative to the more common option is less expensive, less wasteful, and higher quality. Plus, adding an additional step contributed to my ritual. I also started having a clearer idea of teas that I liked, even though they were still mostly flavored teas or blends of one variety of another: a little Earl Grey, a little Lapsang Souchong, and some simple English Breakfast.
Sometime in the winter of 2017 when I was living with my then-partner, there was a week where I wound up home alone in the winter while she was vacationing with a friend in San Diego. I think I was unemployed at the time as well, and somehow I wound up on the r/tea subreddit and saw several posts about something called gong fu brewing, which I came to learn was an Asian-style brew method that typically uses a vessel called a gaiwan, and uses a higher quality loose leaf tea than what I was getting at my grocery store.
This was sort of like discovering the holy grail. I realized there was more to learn, a deeper ritual to discover, and a way to even further enjoy something I was already deeply passionate about. Plus there were a few pieces of inexpensive, but simple and beautiful hardware to buy.
I learned that there was an Asian-style tea shop about a mile away from my apartment. On my first visit, I bought $40 worth of oolong tea, having never have tried an oolong tea before. This turned out to be a very good decision. I had a gaiwan on the way from Amazon (a few were sold at the tea shop, but for considerably more money). I also bought a scale and a thermometer to get the right water temperature and tea-to-water ratios. Not being able to wait for my package when I returned from the tea shop, I put a generous three-finger pinch of tea into a basket infuser and brewed it for 15 seconds in a teacup before pulling the basket back out. Two or three more infusions like that, and I was completely hooked. Using a new brew method and trying an unfamiliar variety of tea was like falling in love with tea all over again, with the benefit of realizing how much it meant to me in the moment.
My relationship with tea has grown and matured with me over time. Tea to me now is more social, more hands-on, and more flavorful than it’s ever been, and I’m delighted to be able to share it with people in my life — to be the guide I never had. It feels intimate and personal to share a conversation in this setting; to open up with another human being while leaves unfurl in the vessel in front of us.
I occasionally wonder what it might be like if I could be back in my grandparents’ kitchen with the two of them around breakfast time. I would have liked to bring along my gaiwan to share what I’ve learned.