Tea as a Silver Lining · 12 February 2007
On the upside, being sick most of last week gave me the opportunity to indulge in lots and lots of tea drinking. One of my mother’s home remedies is a Hot Toddy: hot tea, honey, lemon, and a dash of whiskey, so it’s no surprise that when my throat starts itching, I reach for a nice cuppa.
Ever since Christmas, tea has been especially enjoyable because I’ve finally solved the problem I had with loose leaf teas!
If I’m going to be perfectly frank, I actually had two problems with loose leaf, and now I just have one. The first problem was that I’d inevitably find my loose leaf tea at local stores, and just as I fell in love with a particular blend, the store went out of business or stopped carrying it. After last week’s tea binge, I’m once again almost out of my favorites and on the prowl for replacements, but when I find them, no longer do I have to wrestle with the mechanical process of brewing the tea in a rickety tea ball; I have a shiny new tea toy.
3 Cup Eclipse Tea Pot With Infuser
In the mad throes of Christmas shopping, I found this little gem, tucked in behind all sorts of other dispossessed kitchenware at a local discount store. I bought it for a household member, and I’m going to have to break down and get one like it for myself since I think I use it more than they do.
What makes this pot so great you ask? Well, if you’ve ever brewed a pot of tea for yourself you’ve probably experienced one of three things that plagued me in my prior setup, improper brewing strength, tea leaf overflow, or quantity problems. I’d been working with a perfectly functional white ceramic tea pot. Boil water, add tea to a tea ball, immerse the tea ball, and steep. The problem was that I couldn’t see the strength of the tea through the ceramic, inevitably the tea leaves would shake free of the tea ball designed to less than NASA specifications, and (unless I was in extreme need) I could never finish an entire pot of tea before it went cold.
The little infuser pot solves all three of these problems, clear glass makes it easy to see how strong the tea is, the infuser sits in a seated lid so there is no danger of stray leaves making it into the tea, and I can easily finish an entire pot by myself. I imagine this product is actually a knock-off of the Bodum Assam 4-Cup Tea Press which I may eventually splurge on (it’s designed by the Brits after all, and they’re serious about their tea) but until then, I’m happily sipping away, thankfully with a far less sore throat this week than last.
Searchable keywords/ Technorati tags: Beverages Home Remedies Hot Toddy Kitchen Gadgets Tea Brewing Tea Leaves
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