A Tea Time Obsession

I have always had a special fondness for tea: black, green, white or herbal infusion... Most of that stems from my extreme sensitivity to caffeine. One cup of ick Folgers coffee at lab meeting and I'm shaking and crawling the walls within the hour. Black tea is definitely my perk-me-up beverage of choice - Earl Grey mostly. Whenever I stayed home sick in elementary school I got to spend the day with my grandmother. We would drink Earl Grey with milk and sugar out of fancy china and watch Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn movies - though it has become a daily routine with me, the first whiff of bergamot always makes me smile (at the time I thought I could grow up to have a Roman Holiday kind of life - ha).
Ines, Hannah and I have forged a great friendship over many cups of tea during long winter afternoons in the lab. To further our tea explorations, we recently decided to go in together and place an order to The Republic of Tea to try all sorts of new styles and flavors. It was a great idea. You can buy each of the teas in the normal 50 cup size (either loose or bagged), but they also offer sample sizes of most of the different teas - 6 bags to each "traveler's tin" and 7-8 cups worth of loose tea in the sample bags. We placed the order (together so we would get enough for free shipping) and went out to buy a french press - my newest kitchen gadget - that is just as good straining out loose leaf tea as it is with coffee grounds. The press makes about a liter of tea, and each sample pack has enough tea for two tasting rounds. I make a liter of tea when I get here through the morning and drink it throughout the day. It's a great way for me to get my water for the day as well as get all the tea-rriffic health benefits of both black and green tea (so sorry, can't turn off the pun generator).
Today is almost the perfect tea day (we're trying wild berry plum green tea today)- rainy, cool and completely unmotivating - now, if only I could sit and drink my steaming cup on the couch, curled up with a good book... ~Lissa