This will be my first tea log here, so hello, Steepster! I’m Calli, and I’ve been drinking tea since…I think about 2009? I also used to spend a lot of time lurking on Steepster circa 2011-2015, so I blame you all for my tendency toward chattiness whenever I’m blogging. Here’s hoping that this style of tea-logging has not gone too far out of fashion over the years since I’ve been gone and that I am not therefore too annoying for using it. As for why I was gone – health problems, mostly, and during the last two or three years of that time, I just…stopped making tea for some reason. Now, one of my fandoms has accidentally led me back into tasting and ‘learning’ to drink tea all over again, so I figured I might as well document The Journey Back somewhere.
This tea is not, of course, part of the fandom tea activity that’s helping me slowly learn to use my tongue properly again. This tea is one that kind of stuck around in a limited capacity even throughout my absence from the Land of Tea, and is something I buy in boxes of fifty bags at Fresh Market a time or two per year. For many years, I drank all my tea without adornments, and I still do for the most part, but Taylors of Harrogate Scottish Breakfast was always an exception and still is. I always drink this tea with a generous dose of honey (generic wildflower – the current bottle that was supposed to last all spring, but which might, given how early pollen season has started around here, make it another two weeks at most, is Sam’s Club Member’s Mark) mixed in and after letting a slice of lemon float in it for a while. This is because I have absolutely wretched spring allergies, and very strong black tea with honey and lemon is one of the few things that helps with the bevy of symptoms which inevitably outwit, outplay, and outlast my daily doses of Allegra. Sometimes I have to repeat the treatment a time or two throughout the day on a very bad day, but as a rule, I’ll be basically okay after I stop sneezing over and over again, and this mix usually has the power to make me stop sneezing.
Strange shout-out time: I picked up the idea to try this method from a fanfiction author who writes really excellent long-form Chronicles of Narnia stories and goes by rthstewart on Ao3 and ff.net, and is also the reason I’ve spent way too much of the past few years on Ao3. Would definitely recommend checking her out if adult perspectives on Narnia, fiction that deals fairly seriously with religious ideas without devolving into junk religious-genre stuff, or World War II spy dramas (yes, I’m quite serious – these fics were also what led me to read the work of John le Carre) appeal to you at all.
Taylors of Harrogate isn’t, for probably obvious reasons, mentioned by name in the amusing tales of Edmund Pevensie’s attempts to survive partially presiding over a court which prominently features a lot of tree spirits every spring, but it’s become what I imagine when rereading those bits. The box says it’s a mix of second flush Assam and unspecified black teas from Kenya which is supposed to be ideal for soft water, and a bit of quick-googling reveals that my home region apparently has either soft or even, in places, very soft water from the Chattahoochee River, so perhaps this is another reason why the tea and I get along well. This cup was made in a “1990 – Bouquet 100 Years of Royal Albert” mug, which Google says holds about 400ml, and with one teabag. The box says the net weight of the 50 teabags is about 4.41 oz or 125g, so I divided 125 by fifty to try to figure out how much tea might be in each bag. The answer I got was 2.5, so 2.5 grams is what I’m going to assume is the average weight of tea per bag for this blend until/unless I get better info. My apologies if any of these calculations is inaccurate – like I said, I’m still learning my way back around tea after being ‘gone’ for two and a half years.
I steeped it for three minutes with a sand timer, the way I timed tea when I first started drinking it over a decade ago, and the final liquor is a pretty medium brown that looks excellent against this white china. It started out darker, but the slice of lemon seems to ‘bleach’ it a little. Looking through a list of shades of brown, it seems like the cup ends up somewhere near Hex #B7410E (Rust) or Hex #CD7F32 (Bronze). When I take a swallow, the first thing I get is the lemon (perhaps it accentuates the ‘brightness’ cited for the Kenyan teas), followed by an even mix of strong, if somewhat generic, black tea and wildflower honey. I’m sure the tea would have a more distinctive individual taste without the honey and lemon, but I can still tell I’m drinking tea here and not just hot water with lemon in it. It’s dry on the tongue, which I believe is one of its natural attributes which is probably also accentuated by the lemon, and it’s strong without tasting thick, at least in this adulterated form. The associations it brings to mind, if I can be forgiven the abstraction, are things like a sunny morning in a cozy kitchen and someone cheerfully telling you to drink up and get on with your day, which is…more or less what I’m going to do now that I’ve got a decent amount of my old medicinal friend here down my throat and my brain feels a little clearer. It’s definitely not a tea I’d drink for a Fine Tea Experience, but it’s wonderful as a morning pick-me-up. Don’t delay washing up any tea things you use with this one, though, because if you do, it will stain – those tannins are powerful! Do not leave any cup or pot you’re especially fond of in the sink to be washed later, at least not unless you’re trying to ‘season’ your mug in the traditional British fashion.
