I'm a tea drinker now.
You may recall me writing last year that I had stopped drinking coffee at work. Well I still like the ritual of drinking a hot beverage while at work if I am sitting at my desk. It is a way to help me relax. I am also the type of person that always has to be doing something, so if I am reading a report or something else, I had coffee to give my hands something to do, the hand-to-mouth fixation.
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| Tea at my desk in the afternoon. Green tea for lunch and a flavored tea from the morning. |
Well I stopped drinking coffee. I was already drinking chilled green tea with lemon juice when I ate lunch so I decided that I would replace coffee with tea. I tried a variety of brands and different types of tea. After about a year of experimenting, I finally decided what type of tea I liked.
Normally, I'll drink tea three times a day at work if I'm not at a meeting or otherwise busy. I'll have a tea once in the morning before lunch, a cold tea with lunch, and then another cup after lunch. So we already established that I drink chilled green tea with lemon juice at lunch (I prepare 8 reusable bottles on the weekend for the week’s lunches). I don’t mind what brand of green tea I use, I just use regular green tea and then squeeze the lemon juice into the pitcher and mix it up.
Regular green or black tea was not going to work for me. I don’t add cream or sugar or honey or lemon to hot tea. I wanted something that I could keep at my desk so I could drink when I wanted it without other ingredients. After trying different flavors of tea, I decided that I liked a fruit blend with the tea and that I absolutely hated any kind of tea with rose in it. We had been making iced tea infused with peach or blueberry so this seemed to work. Once I realized that I liked a fruit blend, I tried different types including berry, peach, pineapple, citrus, etc. I liked the citrus but many of those came out too weak and didn’t keep the flavor. Pineapple, peach, and plum weren’t that good – just not my thing. It turns out that I like a berry flavored tea.
Now I thought that I liked green tea exclusively. Well it turns out that while green tea is my favorite, I like to drink a strong black tea in the afternoons. I like a soft green tea in the morning and the full flavor of black tea in the afternoon.
Regarding my preferred brand of tea, it is the Republic of Tea. This brand has lots of flavors I like and the recipes are better than any other I’ve had. I’ll order a variety of tins from them and am able to keep mixing up daily flavors to prevent any one blend from getting old.
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| Republic of Tea flavored teas that I have been drinking recently. |
