About tea.

One can never have too many different teas; I have well over 30, though I've lost count, and they take up an entire shelf in my large cupboard. I started to really appreciate the finer points of tea while pregnant with my daughter, now 3 - it's amazing what 9 months without a cocktail will do to you. Appreciating tea is much like appreciating fine wine and spirits. Today I came across Uncle Lee's Tea, and their gunpowder green looked too tempting to pass up.

Gunpowder is a lovely smoky loose tea; the leaves are rolled into little balls before processing (the Chinese call it pearl tea). This supposedly helps it retain better flavor than regular tea. Uncle Lee's brand of gunpowder comes in a vaccuum-sealed brick, inside a can, inside a box - an awful lot of packaging for a small bag of tea, but it makes a difference. When you open the bag it smells really fresh, almost grassy, much the way I imagine fresh tea leaves smell before processing. I've rarely come across teas this fresh, except some brought over by Chinese friends. When brewed it produces a rich golden-colored tea with delicate toasty-smoky flavors and a pleasant strong aftertaste that's not at all bitter. This is just what green tea should be, and Uncle Lee's Tea delivers a beautiful cup of mid-to-high-grade tea at a price that is very reasonable (a little over $7).

But why is green tea called green? All teas come from the leaves of the same plant (the tea plant) - but the 'color' of the tea (white, green, black) denotes the age of the leaves when picked for processing. White are the young, tender leaf buds, and their brew has a very delicate, aromatic, and never bitter flavor; green are still young and have a delicate flavor but can become bitter easily if brewed too long (low-grade greens always brew bitter teas no matter the timing); black are fully matured leaves with rich, full flavor, and make up the characteristic English and European teas such as Earl Grey. Each stage of tea leaf and type of tea is also processed differently. There is a leaf sometimes called red tea, but this is in fact not from the tea plant. It comes from an African bush called rooibos; the leaves produce a sweeter, rich tea and contain no caffiene. The more mature the tea leaf, the higher the caffiene content.

Note: White and green teas should produce golden-hued brews, so be wary of any green tea that makes green-colored tea.