The Sweetest Or Elitist?

I'm a coffee drinker. Every now and again, I'll get a cup of so-called premium coffee from Starbucks (or, in Chicago, Caribou), but almost always end up feeling let down by what I'm getting. I like the stuff I make at home just as much, and it's as easy as it is cheap to do. To really do it right in my eyes, it takes whole beans, a grinder and a fairly sophisticated machine. I appreciate the value of the press device, but it's not for me. Coffee is my drink largely because it is so egalitarian. To me it is the people's drink.

Some quick research shows coffee to be the world's third favorite beverage behind water and my main interest in writing today, tea. Every once in a while, I get the idea that I'm going to start getting into tea. What stops me? Ultimately it's got to be my true nature which collides with my best intentions. At those times, I want to be someone who likes tea, but that doesn't make me such a person. I do not care for the taste, or at least the taste of what I have consumed so far.

It may be so that I have not had a truly representative experience with tea, and if this is so it may be because of the considerably higher learning curve in the making of it. Most tea I see consumed, and all that I have myself consumed, is from the little tea bag with the string and a paper label at the end which one holds with thumb and forefinger while dunking it in the hot water. It's a comforting ritual for some, but I see it for what it is: the same thing as eating Chinese food with a fork and knife, or riding a bicycle with training wheels.

I may not understand how one goes all out in making tea, but I know it requires an extensive set of tools and ingredients. You've got to have a metal ball and loose leaves, and who knows whatever else. It seems like quite an investment to make, and not even your run-of-the-mill restaurant makes it. They just give you exactly what you can do at home. One has to go to the specialty places, which only feel like the place to go when one has just left a production of legitimate theater, and I don't do that. No, I'm not a tea person. I'll leave it to the old guard British to have their tea time. I'm an American secure in the excellence of the New World, and coffee is sufficient for me.