Silly Musings About (Hot) Beverages

Q:Tea or coffee?
A: Yes, please!

You take a piece of a plant, roast it, brew it with hot water. Sometimes you add a sweetener; sometimes you add a milk of some kind. This is true of both coffee and tea. With coffee, the plant part is the seed (bean) of the coffee fruit (cherry). With tea, if it is a true tea then it is the leaves or twigs of a plant (camellia sinensis). If it is a tisane, it may be any part of a variety of plants, from root to flower.

So why the "or"?

Then there are all the ways of preparing the beverage. Both coffee and tea can be brewed in a variety of ways, depending on the effect that you want. You can sweeten it with that stuff in the blue packet, or you can use cinnamon and star anise. You can fill your cup with steamed hemp milk, or you can roll your espresso over slow-churned ice cream.

I have habits, but it is tough to say that I have a favorite. My habit for coffee is espresso. I like short Americanos -- shots of espresso dropped into a few ounces of very hot water -- taken black. I also have a nostalgic fondness for coffee Cuban style, where the strongly brewed coffee is served separately from a mug of hot milk, to be added to taste. My habit for tea is Assam or a smoky tea, loose leaf, brewed on mug at a time in my favorite mug, which holds about two and a half cups of liquid, and is made out of brown clay with a glossy sable glaze. I got it in Winthrop, right up by Washington Pass. It has a chip on the lip, now, but it will have to be in pieces before I give up using it.

Both coffee and tea are comfort drinks. As I've gotten older, I've started to see the effects of caffeine like a normal person. My days of drinking coffee late at night but having no trouble sleeping are lost to my decades passed. That does mean that I drink more green (lower caffeine) and herbal tea now. I have even found that drinking green tea, when I have coffee jitters, smooths out the jitters. Camellia Sinensis has components (theanine) in it that make the caffeine in it operate differently.

Here is a short entry in the US National Library of Medicine on caffeine and theanine:
Although both contain behaviorally significant concentrations of caffeine, tea is commonly perceived to be a less stimulating drink than coffee. At least part of the explanation for this may be that theanine, which is present in tea but not coffee, has relaxing effects. There is also some evidence that theanine affects cognitive performance, and it has been found to reduce blood pressure in hypertensive rats.
Read the rest of the article

I read that as "hypersensitive rats" and thought it sounded like an insult that Holly Golightly ("Breakfast at Tiffany's") would use. If you read the entire entry, or follow some of the related reviews in the sidebar on the same site -- the others seemed much more technically worded -- you'll see that theanine still isn't fully understood.

Does that make it fair to call tea a more complex drink? Does that complexity appeal to discerning beverage drinkers who favor it over the egalitarian nature of coffee?  Maybe?

No, I'm not buying that, either.

For Americans, coffee is the drink of the average Joe. It's even called "joe" as one of its many names. Unless it is fashionable coffee, such as a "venti skinny sugar free macchiato extra hot, no-foam" from that infamous espresso coffee chain.  By the way, never order that drink. What you'd really be drinking, there, is a pint plus a quarter cup of semi-scalded nonfat milk with artificial vanilla flavored and caramel flavored artificial sugar syrups covering up the two over-extracted espresso shots. That is a sad drink. That drink is a lot of milk and sugar, and you will get used to it, and later wonder where the extra weight is from when you always choose the "diet" options.  And yes, I am a Seattle coffee snob. I was a barista for eight years. The families that pick coffee with such care (on farms such as my brother-in-law's farm in El Salvador) want you to drink good coffee.

Tea has a ring of the exotic. Tea connotes English tea-time, the Mad Hatter's tea, exotic China, Japan, and India, and... fussy people who can't handle coffee. Once you get among the loose-leaf drinkers, you'll find out about all the things you didn't know about tea. Sit down with a Chinese tea seller at his tea table, watch how tea is brewed Chinese style (no teapot!), and drink cup after tiny cup of red tea, and it will change your life. Curl up with an aromatic mug of Indian chai (which just means, "tea"), a drink spiced with cinnamon, ginger, star anise, and more, perhaps sweetened with honey, made thick and silky with creamy milk (non-cow milk is good, too).

Japan has a tea ceremony. Ethiopia has a coffee ceremony.

And what about chicory? Isn't that cheating? Because chicory, deliciously nutty and slightly sweet on its own, is a tisane if brewed in place of coffee. Chicory is traditionally added to coffee to give it a distinctive, regional taste. It might have started out as a way to make do when there wasn't enough coffee to be had, but it has become a style of coffee all its own.

So why limit yourself? You can have it all.

Or you can have a hot chocolate.