Tea and Me

So, I haven’t had much time for tea tasting recently as I spent last weekend at the Harry Potter convention called LeakyCon  which was held at the Citywest Hotel in Dublin — if you were there you would have seen me dressed either as the Fat Lady, Doris Crockford or in my Slytherin robes. It was an amazing weekend, full of magic and fun, but it was also pretty non-stop so there wasn’t much time for sleeping. As I already knew this was going to be the case I prepared in advance by making up my own tea bags — Morning Kick to wake me up and get me going in the morning, Apricot and Garden of England to get me through the afternoon, and Milk Oolong Caramel for the evening wind down. I didn’t just drink my own tea, though. Over the course of the weekend, I also had several excellent pots of generic tea in the hotel lounge (as well as quite a few pints of their rather marvellous Orchard Thieves cider). However, unfortunately, despite my best attempts, I didn’t manage to try...

In the dim and distant 1980s and 90s, anything that wasn’t ‘normal’ Indian tea was considered ‘herbal’ and was, therefore, generally only available from health food shops (or in Chinese restaurants in the case of Jasmine tea) – unlike today, when every style and flavour of tea fills up both the supermarket shelves and specialist online tea sites – oh, how far we’ve come. I used to regularly frequent Holland and Barrett as one of the only health food stores I had access to, to buy such exciting fare as those provided by the brands Heath and Heather and Yogi. One of my favourite blends was lemon and ginger (which I seem to recall was also one of Twinings first attempts at branching out into more interesting flavours) which was perfect for keeping me going in that post-lunch slump and was good for when I was bunged up with a cold or hayfever, had a sore throat or just generally felt a bit rough. Obviously, this was the start of my love of ginger-flavoured teas although I never realis...