A hit piece on coffee:
Ahhh coffee Vs tea. This comes up a lot in the tea world, I doubt that coffee aficionado’s have regular ‘coffee Vs tea’ conversations! Why might that be? We tea enthusiasts just aren’t on the radar, we pose no threat to the coffee racket, we are the esoteric niche of the beverage world that some lucky few may have the ‘happy accident’ of discovering.
There’s an undercurrent of animosity towards the naughty bean in our tea world. From my perspective there are a few reasons. The ex coffee drinkers who flipped from the dark side, often filled with evangelical rage at the notion of a cheeky espresso. The peeps who look back with rose tinted glasses on the glorious ‘pre tea bag’ days when tea was proper! Also perhaps a midge of tribalism? As if we live in a binary beverage world!
Coffee:
Coffee is popular as ever, even in China many are converting to the sludgy black stuff but what exactly does artisan coffee offer us? A wide and varied spectrum of flavours? Not really. Honestly I can’t see past the utilitarian nature of coffee, it’s a convenient, quick ‘pick me up’. Flavour, is great but Anything longer than a Lungo I just don’t see the attraction. Hands up 🙌 I sling a shot down my neck every morning and I enjoy it! I need this stuff to operate but I don’t drink this stuff for fun really. Can you imagine a ‘coffee fest’? I’m sure they exist but how many coffees can one ingest in a sitting? This stuff is brutal. The feeling it gives the drinker is harsh, the withdrawals are unforgiving. There’s something quite negative about coffee and what it can do if your a habitual ‘all day’ drinker. Tread carefully.
Tea:
Well, you guys know the score here really. Broad variety of flavour ✅
Fine, nuanced, elegant, intricate and sometimes complex flavours ✅
The ability to drink as much as you want all day without getting hooked. ✅
And then there’s the chi. What coffee can offer chi? This grounding, meditative and intoxicating feeling? Chi is the apex of the ‘over all feeling’ that I adore in tea and I don’t mean strictly high end stuff. Once I’ve got my head straight and alert after my morning shot and actually feel human I’m in search of something more. The way I see it, coffee gives an injection of caffeine…nothing else. If I were to have another coffee mid day the pick me up is acute and harsh and it just doesn’t hit the spot. Tea offers a fuller, richer, wholesome and all encompassing lift. 3 or 4 steeps of idk, oolong or black tea delivers a more refreshing lift that I can’t quite explain but it just gives me more energy, REAL energy opposed to this fake buzz from coffee.
Thanks for getting to the end. Oli