I Am Completely Serious

Adagio Teas has mastered the art of crowdsourcing market research.

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 14:29:37 GMT

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Fri, 21 Aug 2015 03:21:04 GMT

People have made a lot of worrying remarks on the tea lies post, but the only ones that actually offend me are the people who talk shit about pu erh. How fucking dare.

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Another entry in today's unfortunate stream-of-semiconsciousness-blogging

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 04:49:12 GMT

Also I was running out of pu erh (is the portion of my life force not comprised by sencha) and ordered a new cheap cake thereof, but then forgot I had done so. And then I failed to go out and check the mailbox for a few days, as I do when I get into this state. So of course the tea came and sat out in the heat for days, and I condemned myself to fermented tea hell for committing one of the cardinal fermented tea sins.

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Help me, food chemists.

Sun, 03 May 2015 19:06:24 GMT

What is the sort of blunt metallic/rusty taste that's in both

1) stale old green and oolong tea,

and

2) canned green beans

?

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When I feel bad I look at kyusu online and go like "I want that kyusu."

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 18:05:25 GMT

Someone please buy me this one.

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I am the tea expert.

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 01:55:57 GMT

When selecting a cake of pu erh, I go unerringly for the one with human hair in it.

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Coffee is a terrible thing.

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:23:35 GMT

Because it's addictive and it gives you headaches when you don't drink it and it gives you jitters when you do. And it's not tea.

But I'm drinking it because I've been put on medication that makes me really groggy, and I find that I cannot safely shave in the morning without having first had some. I can't even wash my face, I keep dropping the cleanser bottle and getting it all over everything.

Dad is an obsessive connoisseur of overpriced coffee, and he would probably be happy about having finally converted me, if I didn't prefer instant. This upsets him. I think instant is good because you can just mix a spoonful into cold soymilk and drink it like that. It's two bean beverages combined! It's good thematically! He probably feels a knife twisting in his heart every time I do this.

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Three unrelated topics.

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 04:21:42 GMT

* So Yamamotoyama's website makes you print out a PDF of their mail-order form? It's crazy, it's like the 19th century or something! But the Tokusen Kokyu Sencha is really good and costs almost twice as much from Amazon, so I am willing to do this.

* The freezer is full of kielbasa for reasons that escape me. I'm thinking of turning some of it into some kind of soup.

* When I enter the living room, Anxiety the Cat sits on the back of the couch and mews plaintively at me. He continues doing this until I either give him his allergy tablet - he's decided he loves Pill Pockets, following a lengthy period of hating them - or sit down on the couch so he can roll anxiously around my lap, peering up at me uncertainly to make sure I'm not moving. Anxiety was Nixon's servant; he would sit down on the couch, and she would sit down on top of him and fall asleep, and he wouldn't move until she was ready to get up again.

I'm not sure if what he's doing is some sort of grieving behavior, or if he's decided that he is the primary cat now and must therefore behave as much like her as possible. If that's his goal, it's unfortunate that he's too self-conscious to do the role justice. He only vocalizes when I'm looking directly at him and he knows for sure he's got my attention, and though he's twice Nixon's size, he doesn't feel secure enough in his physical presence to follow me around or headbutt me. He kneads my legs like a kitten when he gets me on the couch. Poor neurotic cat.

Should I be calling him "Ford"?

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The scientists have solved tea.

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:51:23 GMT

But only black tea, with sugar and milk in it. Barbarian tea, basically. I frankly don't see why science bothers to lower itself to the examination of such a base subject.

Proper tea, of course, is steeped for about eighty seconds in water that, after boiling, was poured briefly into a second vessel before being returned to the one in which the tea is to be brewed. Proper tea calls the police like a good citizen if it sees a sugar packet.

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Tea and chocolate, OR: In Which My Identity is Defined by the Products I Consume.

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:23:27 GMT

Because I'm an American! Also, because of Modernity.

Ordinarily, there's no reason that I should ever review food, because I have no taste. But I do drink a lot of genmaicha, so I think I'm allowed to be a jerk about that particular subject. Garasha genmaicha tastes weird - there's a kind of an unpleasant metallic aftertaste. I'm probably not going to throw the bag away, but I'm definitely not going to buy this brand again. I will continue to stick to Den's Tea for genmaicha, I guess!

I've decided that a good way for me to simultaneously Be A Good Citizen and deal with my impulse to make rules about everything, is to only buy either Fair Trade chocolate, or chocolate from companies that go like, "Fair Trade: Not Fair Enough!" Grenada would be good, but the store that sells it is forty-five minutes away, and I am unlikely to have any reason to go there again. So that leaves me with Divine. (Dagoba and Green and Blacks have a few Fair Trade bars, but most of them aren't, so that feels like cheating.)

Unrelated to anything, egg and onion matzos are delicious, particularly when consumed with sardines or hummus. I also like gefilte fish now. If consumption defines my identity, does eating these things make me a proper secular Jew? Maybe all the pinto beans with salt bacon act as a cultural counterweight.

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