💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 10-02.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I just got back from the west coast. One of the things I look forward to when visiting my family is to stop by Murchie's. They're a tea merchant and sell a lot of really high-quality teas. Growing up, when I had tea, which wasn't often, it was often one of the grocery store brands, and probably Red Rose. Red Rose is to Canada what PG Tips or Typhoo is to England - a fairly cheap, inexpensive tea for people whose relationship with tea doesn't really go beyond the fact that it needs to taste like tea when taken with milk and sugar. Which is fine - these sorts of brands establish a safe, middle ground. It's from here that you can branch out, or just happily enjoy your tea.
I care about how my tea tastes, at least superficially; I can't claim to be a supertester, but I can tell differences between heavier teas (breakfast, Assam, Ceylon, and others) and the lighter, more delicate ones. I like smokier teas in the winter, and avoid them in the summer, similar I guess to how I like porters and heavier ABV beers in the winter, and switch to pilsners and pale ales in summertime. Given this, it's always a delight to be able to drop into a Murchie's in-person and browse. The website's fine, and because I don't visit my family enough, I find I often have to stock up between trips using it. But nothing beats walking down from my parents' place to the Murchie's a few blocks away, taking in the beauty of the Victorian building in which it's housed, and then wandering around a bit after, maybe stopping by the nearby bookshop, or arcade, or a little patio for a pint.
The trip was long overdue. It had been almost two years. That's a long time, but last year didn't work out and my parents don't travel well anymore, so there's an expectation I'll always come out to see them. My parents have visited me twice since I moved out when I was 21. My sister's visited once, when my partner and I were at the old house. Overall, not very much, and I'm a little salty about it, but it's not worth bringing up, you know? Whenever something really bugs me, I ask myself if it's worth having a proper fight about, and this, like many other things, squarely qualifies as "no".
Back to the original topic: despite all this, strangely, my love of good/fancy tea doesn't really carry over to making iced tea. I think because I take it with a lot of lemon, I just need the underlying drink to taste faintly, or enough, like tea. The nuance blasted away with citrus. Why waste seven bags of something good?
In the end: a lot of dithering in the store, but I picked up a lemon and also a berry tisane for my wife, a couple of green teas for a friend, and a half pound of a strong, black tea for myself.