The Tea Drinkers Liberation Front

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 12:52

The Conspiracy against Tea and the Tea Drinkers Liberation Front
In the States not since the Boston Tea Party has there been a decent cup of tea
A tribute to Malachi McCormick’s timeless book A Decent Cup of Tea

Have you ever wondered how it is that at every café with a fast food styled drive through no less which can be found on all those streets that look the same across all the states how difficult it is to find a simple cup of tea? There are endless electronic apparatus and appliances for grinding and brewing all sorts of different coffees but you know as well as I do what is in store for a member of the tea drinking resistance! Within all those places that euro “want to be” types call cafés and no longer coffeehouses, are so many different cups of coffee and coffees of the day to choose from… There in those little shops of coffee horrors are the ranges of coffee beans waiting to be hatched into the perfect cup of coffee from earthy brown roasts to dark oily roasts. There are special foreign made complicated machines and mugs and frilly unnecessities like frothed and steamed milk, or cream, whipped or not, skimmed or not and all with an insiders lingo to order all these like some brazen form or retail pretentious performance art. There are flavored coffees and such sizes and names and prices; from a shot of one or two (does it come with a needle and an elastic strap?) of Italianate espresso to a bowl of French styled café au lait which when an American orders this it sounds like a Spanish Bullfighters call “ole” rather than something to do with milk from the French language!

The best coffee memory from back home for everyone old enough to remember these pieces of vanishing America who can do so without the help of the movies is the old American diner. Those inexpensive coffeehouse cafés of automatic Bunn brand coffee dished out with free refills and a smile has unwillingly gone by the wayside relegated to a certain collective mythology as even the most working class American buys their Cup-O-Joe on board a television sci-fi Battlestar Galactica from a dubious Starbuck of sorts. You remember Bunn coffee diner style now only a David Lynch Twin Peaks memory – the dark brown plastic handle on the plastic pot direct from the burner for regular coffee and the orange handled pot for decaf or so you hoped if your clinically white polyester wrapped beehive-ed hairdo-ed waitress was nice. Remember the heavy white crockery mug with sturdy handle? Who remembers the big usually red metal and chromed coffee grinder with a dial to select the coarseness? A decent albeit American version of a cup of tea could be had, something from a Lipton brand bag and an actual sturdy tea cup and saucer – not great but not bad when on the road. From that last bit of southern diner gentility gone with the 20th century and Route 66 to an American Biggie in a Styrofoam or waxed paper cup and plastic lid as if it were soda pop of about a half liter in size from a gas station with gourmet coffee and a drive through alongside donuts and policemen and all available in decaf alternatives. It isn’t right when that big coffee to go cup then fits appropriately in a big SUV’s built in beverage holder… Dorothy something isn’t right in the Matrix program.

Have you ever wondered why though if you fancy a decent cup of tea that you get a blank looking face from the café counter attendant – a look suggesting “we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969” (like the Eagles once lamented about other things and please bring me my wife)… And if after that strange hesitation when you think the waiter is going to break into a song, like in that surreal pause after dialogue before a song is sung in a Hollywood musical… They vanish to re-emerge with their tail between their legs with a coffee mug of brackish warm water and at most a selection of paper bagged teas. If it’s a “want to be” upscale place you might even be lucky enough for a Twinings bag, if not it’s Lipton. If it’s a bag of Tazo or say the Republic of Tea etc. and on and on to disappointing etc. then it’s most likely from the hip left leaning establishments left over from late nineteen nineties. The new retail domestic bag brand called Revolution Tea in a spiffy match box is more about the bag and the packaging but lacking the balls for any real impressive idea of revolt. If its bag tea next to a white porcelain pot of hot water it’s probably in a restaurant with cloth napkins and you’ll be paying with plastic. If you are lucky there is a slice of lemon, honey, sugar and milk or at the least any one but certainly not all of those. By the time the server has brought you your hot water for your tea the water is no longer warm enough to steep (for they couldn’t even bother to put the tea bag in the cup or pot before the hot water was released onto the oldest stale bag of left over lip-torn tea).

Forget it if you go out with coffee drinkers to a café and order bag tea. The server will extract from his coffee machinery first your hot water into a mug for your tea then take fifteen or twenty minutes to make your “friends” coffees. When the tray of hot drinks arrives and you get a chance to hurriedly dunk your bag the hot water is not hot at all! No surprise there – it wasn’t an accident. It was one more tired example of the Conspiracy against tea drinkers by the coffee drinking majority.

How many times have you gone out for a cup of tea and just wanted to run behind the café counter and with a well rehearsed Edward Norton and Brad Pitt styled Fight Club punch knock out your prissy coffee queen server with that fastidiously coiffed so it looks like it hasn’t been washed in a week hairstyle and make your own goddamned cup of tea the way it should be? I literally have to restrain myself from this temptation every time I go out and want a cup of tea. Tea is about the moment and what better way than to celebrate the moment at a coffee conspiring retail establishment than to take back our right to a decent cup of tea with a little blood and loose teeth? Maybe in jail behind bars you can find a tea comrade of a police offer to find sympathy and comfort with if only for a moment. Anything is better than tea at a retail chain establishment or worse one of those mega media stores disguised as a bookstore with art and a café that looks like the set to a morning TV talk show.

Ask yourself how many times have you accepted your fate as an ex-pat foreigner of a tea drinker in your native coffee drinking country and dunked your bag into the cooling water. How many times have you wondered about the coffee stains at the bottom inside of the mug and were content to stir things around with a stainless steel greasy spoon. Meanwhile your companions sit smugly pleased with vertical art sculptures of coffee confections unlike anything you can begin to think of how you would actually get all that mountain of dairy passed your lips with all that foam pomp and circumstance.

That elusive cup of tea that even the British can no longer remember how to make properly is like the Empire of either Anglophone land astride the almighty Atlantic sadly gone. For the water is now tap and thus chlorinated and fluoridated to such a degree that the cup of tea now smells like a baked public swimming pool. You don’t even want to know about the cryptosporidium content from that polluted tap! That coffee mug of hot water sitting before you, waiting for you to dunk your bag into, that looks and smells like it was ladled from some forgotten health spa Jacuzzi. With all the machinations for coffee is there no way in hell to get filtered fresh aerated and de-ionized water disease free for tea, piping hot, laid on to fresh whole tea leaves? Which will God forbid then need strained by a strainer? With all the teas from around the world can we not have a choice in tea leaves without paying a small fortune as coffee lovers get to choose their beans? Is there a conspiracy against those of us who prefer tea leaves to tea dust granules in paper bags or arty coffee by the liter? Of course any coffee preferring individual would say not whilst any tea lover would disagree; there is a conspiracy against the tea drinker and as always it comes down to politics and the relentless soul stealing march of capitalism.

If you ask me the conspiracy against tea drinkers started with the unforgettable Boston Tea Party which is now sadly as a historical tidbit of propaganda (did it actually ever really happen?) relegated to the likes of elementary school education books which don’t ever get much read in this day and age of mis-education. And let’s face it most elementary age kids aren’t imbibing yet in too much tea or coffee when there are Coca-cola profits to be made with hot lunches. Of course any tea drinker would support the idea behind the Boston Tea Party. Some colonialist corporation like Merry Old England taxing everything including the precious tea without any sort of representation is just too typical of even US politics (domestic and foreign policies) today. Tea is supposed to be cheap not taxed to high hell along with everything else. Hmmm sounds just like the Bush administration of today doesn’t it? and again it’s another George! Replace Merry Old England with Globalization and Multi-National Corporations each with more revenue than a good sized European country and its time for another tea party on the scale of an Alaskan Exxon Valdez.

So where does one go with such a big conspiracy against tea in this day an age? Well there is always the Taliban I suppose. They probably make a really good cup of generous and hospitable tea over an open fire served up with sympathy for the traveler over there in the mountains of Afghanistan. Despite the American occupation of Iraq you can probably even as an American get a good cup of tea there in Baghdad city during one of the many post Saddam power outages and water shortages. Certainly tea drinkers are treated like terrorists when it comes to getting serviced in the West. Arabia is the last civilized place where you can get dependable tea: Whether sweet mint Moroccan green tea with a hint of orange blossom aroma or Al Shay spiced with Cardamom in Arabia. To the sweetest most delightful cup of various Pakistani styled chai indeed the last stand of a dependable cup of tea might be from the self sufficient citadel of Islam known as Pakistan. Dependable cups of tea are symptomatic of a strong healthy Nation and undependable cups of tea for the people are signs of the failed states in the nations of the West. Think about that! It is so true! I mean when I ask for tea back home in old Ohio you would think I was seven feet tall with a long ante bellum beard and wearing a long white shirt and a small white hand crocheted skull cap. Maybe I should carry as a fashion accoutrement a Kalashnikov slung over my shoulder to get the cup of tea I so desire.

As any decent cup of tea maker knows that the only good cups of tea in the West come from someone’s humble home from within the lonesome kitchens of tea fanatics: Consigned to solitary cups of tea while cafes are loaded down with overly social Screaming Mimi coffee fiends. In the occasional kitchen of a tea fanatic revolutionary you will find no bags for individual cups of tea. Certainly no deplorable Celestial Seasonings with those arty cardboard boxes! There will be a sturdy well used pot and some proper cups maybe a few cracks or chips to compliment the crackpot character of a today’s last stand of the tea drinkers! All of these unintended effects allow the tea to achieve easily the desired temperature for taking the tea in dignity and camaraderie.

Just to show that we tea drinkers are not unreasonable towards our coffee loving friends despite our being denied tea and not being cranky we observe a lot of what is still good about the art of coffee. It too is a lost art:

Whatever became of New Orleans Café du Monde adjacent to Jackson Square did Katrina wipe this landmark away or had all those fast food coffee cafes replaced her first I wonder? It’s been years since I was lost and in love with that old great dame of New Orleans. Back then in the early nineteen nineties you could still find beignets and café au lait anytime of the day or night and as I was in New Orleans during one of the colder winters in an apartment with no heat, Café du Monde was a reliable place to go get warm with a smile and a friendly chat. There wasn’t going to be a decent cup of tea from their kitchen but as any tea soldier knows sometimes its better to settle for coffee than be disappointed by improperly made tea. From there to the 24 hour bars which were warm and back to avoid the cold. A decent cup of tea was hard to come by but I didn’t complain. Tea drinkers know if you complain about the lack of tea available you will become as bitter in spirit as unsweetened coffee.

If you are bored and want to amuse yourself at a café watch your server make a special cup of deluxe coffee for someone sitting nearby. Watch the retail clerk performance by first grinding the beans and setting up the coffee making apparatus. Watch your servers bar tender like showman ship from the flick of the wrists to the pushing of buttons and even how they use their use their hips in such ways to generate this coffee extravaganza. Watch how intently they steam the milk under all that hot water pressure. The affected pretenses involved in making the cup of coffee a work of art. And how this whole process starts with this incomprehensible language of one up man ship to say I know more about this coffee fashion than you! Compare that to the process involved with ordering tea… You mean you don’t want a bottle or can of “iced” tea…? Then the blank stare: Hot tea? “…We haven’t had that spirit here….” You know the routine (since like 1869). The servers posture deflates, they skulk off to the drudgery of the kitchen dragging their heels – first to go take their much needed cigarette break after such a culture shock confrontation. No game of pretension to play to see who is best – clerk or customer. No question like which kind of leaf would you like even though the list for coffees is long… If only the server would ask what kind of tea you want steeped so they can start the process with the heat… and the right temperature for the proper tea leaf as not all tea leaves were created equal when it comes to steeping temperatures but that is just way to much to ask. Then when your tea is brought to you it is not presented like a frothy coffee creation it is sort of absent mindedly dropped off by the server without eye contact while they are busy pre-occupied with their more important coffee games.

It’s just too much to bear. In fact the best cup of tea that is way beyond decent is when you have turned your back on the strip malls of civilization and have gone camping on a weekend experiment like out to a modern version of Thoreau’s Walden. Then with hot stones around the fire used to warm your cups and tea pot you precariously boil spring water to pour over just the right amount of tea leaves in the pot. Even there on the ground by the fire you can make the best cup of tea no amount of money can buy. It’s a rare sort of American version (albeit diluted somewhat) of a tea drinker’s genuine Japanese tea ceremony. In the solitude of nature with only trees as a quiet companion away from civilization you can find the necessary frame of mind to make a perfect pot of tea. In the city you can only hope at best for a Malachi McCormick styled decent cup of tea from your own or your comrade’s kitchen. But away in a natures retreat with time to think and meditate on every important step in making tea you will yield tea the way it was intended. You will thank your higher power that this process will never be retailed and mass marketed across continents around the world. To find a perfect or at the least a decent cup of tea you must first venture into yourself and find that calm spring of tranquility and start from there. From all this albeit New Agery is where tea making begins which is why it’s a process that can be shared but not purchased – This is what every tea drinker knows is the result of the Conspiracy – and why when we sit with that cup of coffee we don’t want - we understand why the perfect cup of tea has no price – it is forever a gift of nature and a form of charity from civilized souls despite their worldly means – evidence perhaps of some Divine compassion.