Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

For the tea drinkers, how do you have your tea?

I have two cups of black tea no sugar each morning.

Teabags....can't remember that last time we used one of our teapots.

Only tea I've ever liked is pine needle tea, supposed to have like 4-5 times the vitamin c of fresh squeezed orange juice. We make it over the fire from snow and white pine needles on my friend's land up in northern MN when we stay in a little log cabin we built.

As you can probably imagine we drink a lot of tea over here!

I normally have what is known as 'builders tea' i.e milk with two sugars. I also like to dunk a good biscuit too. 

I've never been a coffee fan but i do like a nice hot chocolate in winter. 

In an earlier post in this thread, I made reference to "Tea Money" or a "Black Tea Brick" that I occasionally brew a pot of tea from, so thought I ought to provide a bit of graphic depiction in this thread, for those who may be unfamiliar with the concept or product.

Here then is what is left of my brick (about 1/4) after two or three decades of sporadic and very occasional usage.

[ Guests cannot view attachments ]

While now quite old, I can't say that I've noticed any real change in flavor over the years, as it still seems to brew a hearty cup of strong flavored black tea. Perhaps it was already stale when I got it, so further aging hasn't changed it much, but in fact in prior times it was put up this way specifically for transport over great distances that would mean it was years old upon delivery to places like Tibet and Mongolia, at which time it was then actually used as a form of money, and traded in exchange, possibly for years further before being finely consumed, so it is an effective long term preservative technique it would seem. Of course I'm no Tea connoisseur, so maybe I can't tell great from disgusting, but I will say that it seems to be just fine by me, and I compare it favorably to fresh bought name brand teas.

Here is an image I found on line showing both sides of the whole brick or slab, which weighs something over a kilo, perhaps almost 3 pounds when whole, thus each of the 16 small backside divisions weights on the order of 2-3 ounces, and were freely exchanged as a form of money in many cultures.

[ Guests cannot view attachments ]

Extremely tough to break up, I typically use hammer and chisel to get a little to use, like the piece in the lower right hand corner of the first image, which should be broken up further as it is probably at least 4-5 good sized teapots worth at its current size. For brewing individual cups I typically use a knife to carve some off, or a rasp to scrape some off, as the stuff is well crafted to allow for rough handling and long hard transport, by such means as camel caravan or the like.