Man I just need something that I can do, enjoy and take part in without messing my day or my flow up. I got the tea leaves first after doing some research and trying to pick out some leaves that I thought would give me a broad enough range to enjoy over time. The samplers were a really good price/value offering, and I got the earl gray alongside them because I heard something about it smelling froot loops.
Everything I do upsets me and makes me feel so stupid nowadays. So sometimes I just do nothing and try to relax on youtube or something, then some time into that I feel so dumb for wasting another x amount of time staring at my screen instead of doing something else. Last week I had a strong yearning for something that I could just ritualistically do to feel calm. To this end I've taken up journaling, going to the gym, going for walks, and going for a drive. I do all these interchangeably to this day, once a day, every week and by the end of it I just feel like I have done nothing. So I thought that maybe trying out the thing that I always saw my people doing back home in the Philippines, and as stupid as this sounds, in ANIME, would be a good shot. I even see people online making and enjoying tea, and it always looks so soothing and relaxing.
When I think of someone drinking tea, I think of a guy sitting on the ground watching some leaves move around in a glass pot, and then he pours it into cup and sips from it. Every other time I've tried tea here in the US, it was always bags. It tasted like crap each time and I developed a misunderstanding of tea as something that old people and weird people drink to look sophisticated or cool to some extent. Maybe even suave. But then each time I see some guy on youtube make tea the Chinese Gongfu way, or when I play something like Uma Musume and see my awesome horse make herself a "cup of tea" I question if I was wrong about my perception of what tea is. Eventually I landed on getting into it myself, I thought something like "my family, my ancestors, and all the other people in Asia can't possibly be lying about something like this right? No way everyone was drinking tea as much as they were if it tasted like ass." At the time of ordering the tea leaves, and the basic stuff like cups, a pot, and a temp adjustable kettle it felt like I was just trying to grasp on to another hobby to make myself feel better about how down I always felt.
The tea leaves got to me first somehow, and before I had the brewing equipment I spent some time just actually sniffing the little lid inside these tea canisters. WOW, it was nice. Something felt so familiar about the smell, but I can't figure out why I feel this way? The oolong leaves smell like how it was back in my home in the Philippines. Something about their aroma reminded me of banana leaves that my family would wrap some desserts or pastries in, it just felt like I was somewhere I had been in at one point. I forgot about the other ones.
The stuff I got for the brewing is a pair of medium glass cups, a glass pot, and this absurdly overpriced temperature adjustable kettle. Elite Gourmet must have spent $95 max for R&D to design this thing oh my god ITS GARBAGE. The knob feels like it's already broken and I JUST pulled it out of the box. The plug that comes out of the back is oriented... upside down :) Good design is when you make things just cheap enough to avoid being actually useless, as all good managers know. Anyways I made my first steep of real loose leaf tea ever in the washed vessels and, well it was okay. I made the black dragon tea first, 185F for four minutes on the first steep, poured all the juice out to the last drop into the cup, and yeah it tasted like some leaves would in hot water I would guess. I just sat there and smelled the aroma after learning that the water was still hot, that was pretty calming, and the orange-brownish color was nice to look at. Two more steeps, more of the same, but I'm beginning to notice the shift in flavor, from robust and "whole" to more lightweight and kind of sweeter. On my last, the fourth steep, I had increased the brew time to 10 minutes on a whim and increased the temp to 195, and yeah it was lighter in color and the flavor was very different. Wow it was coming through sweet, instead of a bold strong taste in the back of my throat (🤨), it was sweet and light. That was a nice ride, maybe I should have given it one more steep but I felt like that was pretty much the end of it by the 4th round.
It didn't make me feel like a wise old master of the arts, or a cool English guy, or an awesome horse, but man I just sat there and drank that stuff. I wasn't even thinking about anything else other than how cool it was that the flavor would change as the leaves got more and more used up. I didn't feel stupid, or like I was wasting my time, because tea is good for you as I'm told by my Lolo and Lola, and also I didn't mess up the temps or the timing even a smidge. I made those cups of tea with real precision man, don't play with me. Tomorrow I'm going to try the early gray, because I heard it smells like froot loops or something like that? That's some weird stuff, and if it's not true I'm going to be very disappointed.