Your cup of Tea

On Easter weekend, we took my mother in-law on Saturday to Macy’s on Union Square in SF to view their annual spring flower show. The flower arrangements were lush and colorful and an uplifting symbol to entering spring. Afterward, we mosied over to Grant Ave and walked into Chinatown where my brother in-law wanted to try out a tea tasting shop that had just reopened as a clean, bright, modern hole in the wall place set among the t-shirt shops and the busy main street of Chinatown - Red Blossom Tea Company, www.redblossomtea.com. In the past few years that tea has become the new coffee, I’ve passed over being lured into these shops but because we were with my brother in-law this was an opportunity to see how the tea tasting process worked. Much like wine tasting, you are able to select from a wall of tea containers any number of teas you want to taste. I pot is brewed with the precise temperature of water and you taste until you find your cup of tea. The proprietor told us that many wine enthusiasts are tea enthusiasts, tea leaves taste are affected by region, weather, elevation, oxidation etc. Pricing, well it’s not your mother’s pricing - leaves can start from $4 per ounce up to whatever for that one of a kind leaf that they only carry one time and only have 7lbs of. A person could quickly become a tea snob - just like I know that I’m a decaf nonfat Mocha, no whip fan, I now know I’m a Formosa Oolong Tung Ting fan - who da thought.