131. A Cup of Tea

Note to reader: These numbered entries started based upon a TIME magazine article that took up 240 great things about America in 2016. Our country has been having its political struggles, so the magazine wanted to celebrate the good things about America. I took that as my cue to write my own 240 things I like about our country and being American. Here's the next in an installment of great things about our country:

            I’m a tea drinker. As an American coffee has typically been my morning drink but my trips to England taught me about the art of morning AND afternoon tea, so I grasped more firmly onto my love of tea. But here in the US if you want a good cup of tea you really need to make your own. I you’re out at a restaurant they bring you some tepid (never boiling) water and a tea bag that after putting in said tepid water will make you a slightly disgusting cup of dishwater dirtied by the tea bag. (If you want good tea and you’re out, some fast food restaurants actually give you boiling water so that is an option.) The other thing we tend to do in America is collect weeds and put them in little tea bags and call the nasty concoctions “herbal teas.” Try that in some tepid water for a complete turn off and then you might really feel you can relate to the reasoning behind the Boston Tea Party. Certainly, you will understand why hot tea is not an American thing. But maybe that’s just me.

            This will, therefore, come as a surprise to you, as it does me, that I am a huge fan of a tea company in Boulder, Colorado known as the Celestial Seasonings Tea Company. They make all kinds of these herbal teas that I’m not a fan of, but they also do plain old black tea and coffees and plenty of good things as well. Taking the tour of the facility in Boulder where they actually know how to steep a cup of tea even heartened me to a few herbal tea flavors. I was impressed by how they came up with enough concoctions to please even an herbal skeptic like myself.

            I don’t have an answer to everyone’s herbal thoughts, but I would suggest you give some a try. You can even drink it with a splash of milk. They have enough flavors that you can sample a few and decide which ones you might actually buy. And, of course, this is America, so you can drink any of those teas—green, black, red, white, or herbal—iced if you aren’t one for a nice hot cup of tea on a frosty afternoon. And, of course, many of the Celestial Seasoning teas are completely caffeine free so you can completely escape any addiction traps.

            So, if you ever get to Boulder when all these weird quarantines end, take a tour of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Company and you’ll see that Americans can get a good cup of tea. And Americans really can gather a bunch of edible herbs and find a way to steep them into something worth drinking. American ingenuity can work even with tea. Yet again something to be thankful for. And if you can’t get anywhere but the grocery store, try a new type of tea to keep these companies in business during these trying times.