I love tea. And if you do too, read on my dear friend.
Tea has been the beverage-of-choice the in the world for millenniums. It has healing properties as well as cancer-fighting antioxidants. These little leaves should truly be a part of everyone’s daily diet.
More recently tea has started to take off in the west, and as more research is done, more and more health benefits are discovered.
Tea can help you:
-lose weight
-perk up and
-sleep. It can also aid in
-digestion, supplement the
-vitamins you’re missing, and
-replace coffee without all the toxic effects.
Also, so many flavors and leaves are grown and available now. Walk into a specialty tea store and you’ll find shelves of different leaves, flavors, and varieties.
But sometimes the older – and more beneficial to your health – teas go unnoticed by the public, in favor of all the flavored ones.
This page is here to inform the budding tea enthusiast of teas that they ought to try during their lifetime; if not, they’re missing out! If you’re a tea enthusiast like I am, read on!
1. Yerba Mate
A very popular tea in South America, this tea actually comes from a small tree, rather than a herb plant. Natives of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay have been brewing this tea for over a hundred years, well aware of it’s specific benefits.
#2. Genmaicha
“Genmai” literally means brown rice, which is exactly what flavours this otherwise normal green tea (“Cha” means “tea” in Cantonese, by the way. That’s why many tea names end in “cha”). Brown rice is roasted and “popped” much like corn, and added to the tea. Due to this, and the nutty, roasted flavour this tea has, it has become known as “popcorn tea”.
#3. Lapsang Souchang
This is perhaps one of the most epic teas in existence. One because it is actually the first black tea in history, secondly for its amazing, unique flavour, and lastly because it has a story behind it. The legend goes as follows:
“The tea was created during the Qing era when the passage of armies delayed the annual drying of the tea leaves in the Wuyi Mountain. Eager to satisfy demand, the tea producers sped up the drying process by having their workers dry the tea leaves over fires made from local pines.”
Due to that method of roasting the tea leaves, the result is a tea with a strong, “smokey” flavour, compared to that of Barbecue, campfire, or even malt whisky. This flavour actually comes from a complicated compound not found in any other type of tea, involving pine smoke and much more.
This tea is definitely not for everyone, as it can be quite strong with its smokey taste. It has been touted as a “manly tea” because of the flavour.
#4. Oolong
Oolong is more of a type of tea then a single brew. It is made using an intense drying and oxidization process, then the leaves are curled and twisted, which gives many oolong teas a unique appearance. The tea can either be wrapped into small beads with a “tail”, or more traditionally, into long, curled leaves. This tea really can’t be labelled as “black”, “white” or “green” tea, it’s really somewhere in between them all, making oolong its own category.
