How did you become the tea lover you are today?
I used to think tea was as simple as a microwaved grocery store tea bag. Wrong, very wrong, I now understand it and acknowledge it! My tea passion started when I had a friend over and I offered her a cup of tea. She thought that I will brew some nice, loose tea, but instead I pulled out the grocery store tea bags. She started to laugh, explained to me what tea really means and gave me some tea web and book suggestions. I started to study about tea and the more I was reading, the more my passion was growing until I wanted to try it on my own and discovered the real tea.
How about you guys? How did your tea experiences start?
I didn’t really have an experience where I became a tea lover. I just was always a tea lover. I can remember being a young child (3 or 4 years) and my mom making me some kind of celestial seasonings type herbal tea every night. (May have possibly been due to a childhood stomache illness – not sure). Everyone in my family is addicted to coffee, so it seems I took the road less travelled.
Doctor Who! No, really, watching Doctor Who is what inspired me to try tea. I was a bit of an Anglophile at the time, so I started drinking some cheap bagged tea black. Oh, it was awful. After a while I got used to the bitterness. Eventually, I tried it with milk and finally started figuring out how good tea could be. I started buying different varieties of bagged tea and then I met Teavana. Yeah, they’re hit-or-miss and overpriced, but they are how I’m starting to enjoy loose leaf!
Now that’s interesting! The passion for England and watching a movie made curious about tea. I know what you mean by the bitterness. It took me a while to get used to it too and now I am only enjoying my tea plain. I don’t like using any kind of sweeteners. But when it comes to herbal infusions and blends I tend to use honey.
Hey Ysah, very nice article thanks for sharing! I see that your love for tea begun more like a necessity replacing the soda or coffee that didn’t do you much good.
For me there isn’t really a story, just memories of drinking fruity Celestial Seasonings tea in my early childhood with my mom, and since becoming older realizing there was so much more to tea than just CS. :)
As for discovering loose leaf, my friend Cindy from work told me about this ‘amazing tea place’ and we had a girls day out and took the bus there. That was DavidsTea, and my first loose leaf was Strawberry Shortcake flavored black tea, ha. xD
I never really liked tea until I tried it out of desperation back in 2007. I was coming back from a business trip, 36 hours of travel across 13 1/2 time zones in some planes that were in a pretty awful state of repair but my last leg was intracontinental and it was an Alaska Airlines flight. I was so tired but this was a short hop and I desperately needed to stay awake. I really really hate coffee so I ordered some tea. That first couple of cups of tea, I needed about 4 sugars in it to make it really palatable for me, but it sparked an interest. I went from grocery store tea to Teavana over the next few years, then I found Adagio and most of my tea came from there for a while. Then I found this website and it’s become an obsession.
in a nutshell:
drank liters when I was young. Drank liters of coffee during my university years, and many years thereafter.
Ran into a ‘charming’ man, got married and became a stay at home mom working from home freelance.
Mr. Nice guy turned out to be not so very nice (personality disorder). fled from an abusive relation, drank more and more coffee then ever before (12 mugs + easy & daily). was an emotional and physical wreck, ending in complete kidney failure.
3 yrs ago, looked in the mirror and said to myself: he, snow white, you are still the fairest of them all, kicked myself in the bud and decided enough was enough, dumped mr nice guy, skipped the coffee, took up yoga and started drinking tea.
This year, finally began to feel the ‘me’ again.
so, I guess tea was more or less my ‘sanctuary.’ Tea is now part of my daily routine, and life feels just fine again!
Sandra thank you for sharing your story with us. I felt sad when I was reading the first part of your story. Having high hopes about something which in the end proves to be disappointing can really get to you. I can’t say I comprehend all that you’ve been through, but I know a bit about what pain is as I felt it deeply at the death of my father.
Leaving aside sad things and past events, you sound really well now and I am really glad to find out that tea actually played an important role in your attempt to change your life. I look at your picture and I see an optimistic person.
I was a major coffee drinker for years, until Christmas 2012 when my husband bought me a steeper and some teas from Davids. I was hooked. 3 months later and I have about 40 teas with a desperate need to add more. Funny enough I have not had coffee since.
Just been around loose leaf tea since birth, strayed from loose leaf for a while due to lack of access, so reduced the amount of tea intake due to only tolorating, and not enjoying the quality, glad to be back to a 90% loose leaf tea stash these days.
When I was younger I tried coffee and absolutely hated it. But I wanted to be cool like my parents and have ‘coffee’ on the weekends like them, so I pestered my Mom to buy me some bagged tea. Lol.
When I got older, my Mom started drinking tea alot more and I picked up from that, especially when she got her tea maker for Mother’s day. Finding places that sold loose tea was like a revelation. I was seriously hooked from then on. Now I’m more into it than my Mom, who gives me funny/amused looks when I start talking about tea. Lol!
This is really funny. I can understand perfectly the situation as my friend who introduced me in the world of tea is now amazed by my growing passion for it and for my willing to transform this passion into a business. She often gives me the same funny/amused look you are mentioning.
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