Finally – we have a new host and everything is up and running. I’m not going to bore you with the finer details of our adventure/ordeal, suffice to say that after a lot of restructuring we are happily settled. There enough said. We shall now swiftly move on to tea.
Our dear pal Lahikmajoe recently posted Over to the leafside on his blog, which was interesting as usual. If you don’t know him already you’re missing out. Either way, one of the points he raised was that there seem to be fewer blogs about black tea than green.
The way he described it was:
“Not that no-one writes about black tea, but to me it seems that in our world of the tea obsessed, darker tea sometimes gets short-changed.”
Well, I think he might have a point there, and that’s what I want to explore.
The key word here is “obsessed.” When Lahikmajoe suspects that green tea’s hogging the blogger’s limelight, he’s not talking about casual sippers who blog chat about their Earl Grey and Breakfast blends. No, the murky world of the leaf obsessed includes those hard core lovers who trek barefoot through China and Japan. Dare devils of tea if you like, fluent in halting Mandarin, friends with a tea master or two. Yes, they do seem to favor green over black, or “brick” over “red.”
Even bloggers of note, who’ve not traveled east, display a flourishing interest in all leaves left green. “Kukicha, Sencha, Bancha, Hojicha, Matcha,” flows off their lips as easily as the teas they pour. The sharper their blog pics, the more detailed the descriptions, the more likely the tea isn’t black. But why?
There’s a cultural halo over Chinese and Japanese teas, that leaves from India and Ceylon do not have. Tea ceremonies thousands of years old, versus the English ritual of 5 o’clock tea. For many leafgeeks it compares to reading Confucius, or a copy of “Good Housekeeping” – an intellectual versus a populist choice.
In addition to green tea’s cultural attraction there remains the allure of the less common, for the West drinks more black than green. “Blogging about the ordinary where is the challenge in that? ‘
Well, challenge or not – I still prefer black tea over green. If that makes me a measly commoner so be it.
I’m off to read Confucius – Sweetly yours, J.
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