English Breakfast

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How can people drink this!?

Seriously. How can you consume this beverage and enjoy it unless you hate yourself.

Or unless you have the world’s worst taste buds.

I figured, oooh, English Breakfast! Nom! And on top of it, this one is from Kenya! I haven’t had a Kenyan tea before (I have one on deck from Auggy), but yeah! Cool, let’s stick the little packet in the slot and see what happens.

Well, first off, this brews up really murky brown. Almost mahogany in color. It’s not clear at all. And the smell coming off of it smells like really strong Liptons, maybe jazzed up a little bit. It’s a fairly nice smell, and I enjoy sniffing it for a few seconds before I take the plunge.

I nearly spat it out.

This is SO BITTER. What the hell?! It just lingers and lingers and lingers. It tastes burnt and dead and awful. It makes you want to cry. I’m glad nobody was in my general vicinity when I took my first sip, or else they might have been worried. Due to the face I was making, of course. I imagine that it twisted into some mask of horror. I literally stuck my tongue out, scrunched up my nose, shook my head a few times.

Then I promptly ran to our pantry and dumped this in the sink.

No.

Just no.

Some people in my office got together and purchased a Flavia beverage maker for their coffee, and one of them gave me a packet of English Breakfast Tea because they know I don’t do coffee. Unfortunately, I’m not finding it drinkable. The smell has a strange pasta-like redolence to it, and the taste is bitter and cardboardy. Not too surprised – I don’t know how they expect to get flavor out of the leaf when it seems like the only thing the machine does is inject super-heated water into a pouch of who-knows-how-old tea dust and then squirt it out again into a paper cup. Thanks for the chance to try it, but I’m sticking to loose leaf.

So, I’m in Nashville for the week at a training session. Are you familiar with the Kuerig coffee makers? The facility I’m at has a Flavia drink dispenser thingie. It’s similar, but with little plastic bags of “coffee” rather than little plastic cups of “coffee”.

I’ve been drinking their English Breakfast tea this afternoon. I’m rating it fairly low, because well, I’ve had tea that’s SO much better. However, for probably being more of a “tea flavored product” rather than actual tea, it’s actually not too bad. I’m much happier drinking this than their coffee, or plain water all day. And the scent is actually pretty nice.

However, after class today, I’m definitely running to a local tea shop to see what types of real tea I can find. (http://www.worldcupoftea.com/)

Harsh and bitter. So much acid it makes my mouth hurt. Has a high-pitched quality that gives me a headache. The worst of the Flavia teas available in my office.

When I returned to the land of hot tea drinkers about two years ago, I began by drinking the free Flavia teas provided in the office machine at my workplace. It had been so long since I imbibed hot tea (being a Southerner, I primarily drank my tea ice cold), that I actually thought this tea was great stuff. I guess I was then naive and tea-ignorant. After branching out considerably since those young and foolish days, and drinking several of the finer teas in life, I now find this Flavia tea to be bitter, muddy, and unenjoyable. If it weren’t free for me to drink, I might even use the word, “nasty”.