How do I make tea? Let me count the ways…

I am sooo not a morning person. I hate to wake up early, unless and until I have some personal motive or gain behind it. Like, wanting to go to the malls early so that I can lose the crowd and the waiting…or wanting to have a leisurely and hot breakfast in my PG. As you can see, even these personal gain options are limited!

Taking my 7 o clock shuttle to office daily while I was in Bangalore was a Herculean task to me. How did I survive then?

Sitting through meeting that go on for hours and your updates are needed just 10 minutes before it closes…how did I survive that?

TP* during the free hour that we get in a work-day…how do I survive that?

Well…the universal answer to all this is, for me, TEA!!!!

So when I came to Germany and was finding my way around here, the first thing that I did was get a cup of tea at breakfast. There are no words to express my disappointment at the light colored brew that was being passed off served as tea. Being so used to the typical Indian chai** I found it very difficult to make my peace with the herbaly, no-taste tea that most café’s served.

It was slightly better at office. There were at least options and I could try my best with it. On my first day, I had an English Earl Gray tea which was better albeit along the same league as my morning tea. The next day onwards, I started experimenting slowly with each of the flavors available. Just so you know, we don’t get hot milk here and the only milk available is a bottled one or the airplane-sachet-like variety. In the bottled milk, I again found two different types: one with 1.5% fett*** and the other with 4.0% fett***. For the first trial I took the former option and well it was ok I guess. In the next trial I tried the latter one which was pretty good. And the next trial I tried the sachet ones which were by far the worst ever!!!

So each day I tried out a new combination…playing around with the varying the amount of water and milk and also the time until which I removed the tea bag. It has been almost a month here and I can finally say that I have hit-on one correct method in which I do make my tea every day!

Yay! :)


P.S: So…any guesses which tea actually worked out for me in the end? ASSAM tea!!!! :P

*TP - Time Pass

**chai – tea
***fett – fat