Tea

A Proper Tea

I used to drink much more coffee than tea, which ended in a very abrupt manner approximately 6 months ago.  It has been a very harsh transition - I would rather give up chocolate and sweets of all kind than my coffee but I am dealing with it.  It is the worst when DH makes a full pot of coffee on Saturday and Sunday mornings and the smell hits me.  The feeling is very much like seeing an intense high school crush that you ache after, who does not even know that you exist.  It hurts so.

Part of my coping mechanism includes drinking copious amounts of tea, decaf tea (hark, the heavens are laughing at me…I, who used to take Louisiana Hot Sauce on my Cheerios during my pregnancies).  If you had to venture into the dark side of sans-caffeine you too know that not every caffeine free tea is palatable but there are exceptions.

One of my top choices is Rooibos tea.  I used to drink this tea during my pregnancies and after but not this much.  Rooibos is Afrikaans for ‘Red Bush’ and it is a member of the legume family of plants.  It grows exclusively in the Cedarber Mountains and around Clanwilliam in South Africa (I had to look it up as I did not know where that was, oh the shame).  To make the tea the leaves of the Rooibos bush are harvested, bruised, finely chopped, moistened and fermented in mounds.  The resulting ‘leaves’ look nothing like the tea leaves that one would expect.  They are deep cinnamon bark red and look like the small candy pellets that one would sprinkle on cookies - you know the kind I mean - sort of like tubular beads.

The tea brews a deep red and tastes very clean and very mild.  For a tea that is not naturally caffeinated (it does not have to go through a process do become decaf), it is simply good.  In addition, the more I drink the tea the more I like the taste so, it grows on one.  For the lack of a better analogy, the tea tastes mildly like honey with a hint of milk or hazelnuts; it is hard to describe a taste this unique. 

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