I've gone through many phases of taste in tea preferences. Why, just in my last 10 years of green-tea drinking, I've gone from Chinese gunpowder to Japanese green leaf, to, just several months ago, Matcha, which is now my daily staple drink.

Matcha is the very, very green part of the tea leaf, with all the coarser bits of stems and veins removed, reduced to the finest imaginable powder form. It's the kind of tea that gets used in the Tea Ceremony, although the grade I'm drinking is probably two orders of magnitude cheaper than the good stuff. In the Tea Ceremony, a bamboo whisk is used to beat the leaf powder into a frothy mix with water before the rest of the hot water is added.

My present technique for my quick morning cuppa involves simply dumping a pinch of powder into my Chinese porcelain mug full of water, and *gasp* using a battery-powered Philips MiniShaker(which has a thin plastic mixing wand you hold in the beverage to be processed while you push the button) for 30 seconds or so to blend the whole cup to a lovely green froth.

The mug is actually a pretty neat thing itself. The whole thing is three pieces, your basic mug as you imagine it, a nicely fitting lid in the same pattern continued from the outside of the mug, and a third piece which slips inside the cup and has holes in it, in which you can put some leaves. Removing the "basket" leaves you with a mostly-strained cup of tea. The lid fits both the cup and the basket, and retains heat, either for brewing, or for keeping the cuppa warm between sips. Obviously, I don't use the basket for the Matcha. The lid is also less useful, as Matcha is typically brewed/mixed and drunk at a lower temperature than strained teas.

Before I was drinking green teas, I was drinking blacks and oolongs, purchased in the tea aisle (note the spelling of "aisle" -- I'm tired of seeing stories on this site that use "isle" incorrectly) of the Chinese supermarkets that I frequent.

Before that, I was drinking English-packaged teas, like Lipton Red and Lipton Yellow, either loose teas or the large bags that make a whole pot at once. And, yes, I have a real teapot with the spout and the little holes to keep the leaves in the pot when you pour.

Before that, it was Red Rose in individual cup bags. Somewhere around here, I decided I prefered milk in my Anglo-American style tea instead of lemon. Before that, Tetley, mostly.

One of my Chinese-American friends remarks at how astringent are the teas that Americans tend to favor. He says he can drinks pots and pots of Chinese tea, but one cup of American tea and his throat is sore. The marketing word for astringent is "brisk", and it makes a good deal of sense once you realize that the bulk of all tea consumed by Americans is as iced tea, where briskness is a desirable characteristic.

I love blogs like this. It shows a glimmer of a person's life. Me, I'm an American tea snob. I order iced tea in American restaurants, green tean in Japanese restaurants, and black tea in Chinese reataurants.
Now, when it comes to beer, I become a snob. That Coors has to come in a bottle and be Ice cold before it touches my lips. Truth be told, I can't drink that stuff. A beer isn't a beer unless it can be drunk warm. Yup, I used to brew my own. It's like tea. Good tea and good beer takes a lot of work. Bottling beer is a real pain in the butt. But as the saying goes, "If beer was easy to make, they would call it wine". I tired of it several years ago when small breweries started selling their brews in stores. I do miss the satisfaction of doing the work myself, but that would be ten hours I can use writing. Just don't get me started on motorcycles, that's the drug I can't resist. Got to go now, I need another cup of coffee, Arecee

Being from the colonies and having spent 34 years as one of the boys in blue, I tend to have consumed thousands of gallons of this stuff. You can't chase me fast enuff to give me anything that StarBigBucks sells, I don't consider it coffee.....that much crap in the cup has to be considered desert. If I was really desperate, I would get one of their Americanos and dilute it with hot water, but that only happened once. I tend to prefer plain old out of the can stuff from Folgers or one of the other big makers.I don't want some weird flavors in it, but I have mellowed a bit in my old age, and can stand a bit of French vanilla mixed in with the regular and then brewed. Don't just pour some syrup crap in at the end. I get by on a bit less than 2 pots a day now, and thats down for me. I still get the nasty headaches if I don't get it, but I can get by with diet coke in place of the caffeine if it is REALLY hot outside. I can get by with tea in cups in the evening if it is hot, but I need some sugar in it, just a bit. And I don't like dainty little cups that I know can break if I breathe hard on them. I want a BIG heavy mug that lets me know its there. I can get by with Earl Grey, but Lady Grey is a bit mild for me. Twinnings comes in a poor third in my taste. I can drink Lipton or about anything....my taste buds are about shot anyway, I can eat jalapeno peppers as a snack when I want to show off or be silly. I do drink a lot of Iced Tea in the summer, but I reduce my coffee intake a bit when I do. I usually use a quart size mug for this...its just convenience. Pretty tea sets are nice to look at, and we have a couple....nothing special, but they are seldom used, just admired. We make the tea by the gallon in the summer...set a jar of cold water in the sun with several bags and watch it go. Or we have one of those fancy Mr Coffee tea makers which is not all the bad really. Fill the pitcher with ice and add the water and several bags and by the time its all pumped out of the reservoir, start drinking. Reckon I'm just a slob after all. But with HAVING to drink over a gallon of liquid a day, I really prefer to add something to the water. The doctor has told me on a couple of occassions that if I did not have that much caffeine in my system, he's afraid he would not be able to find my blood pressure. Of course my triglycerides are very screwed up and probably all because of this.