Hot tea in the tropics

The sun has finally arrived in my (cold) neck of the woods. Vancouver has simply had the coldest spring on record. Filled with rain and cold weather, it was a very depressing and discouraging season. So now that it has begun to warm up, and I can go running outside without two layers and a sweater, there is much rejoicing. But there is always a problem for me… with such warm weather, who wants to drink a hot cup of tea? It’s true that sometimes I can only have that hot cuppa early in the morning, or late into the evening (though sometimes caffeine has been known to keep me long awake.)


So would I partake in tea at the proper afternoon tea-time?
Goodness me no.

And yet……

I have heard of people who drink hot things in summer, and consume cold things in the winter. I’ve even sold ice cream bars in the dead of winter to people who are going outside to go play mini golf. They claim it is the best way to keep cool and warm, respectively. I was decidedly thinking it was a bunch of hooey, but more and more people came through swearing by it. Was it all hogwash, or did it have some merit in reality.
Perhaps there was some truth to the theory, because when you think about it the places hot beverages originate from tend to be very hot locations.

Coffee is produce in quite warm climates, and thought to originate in Ethiopia. Chocolate, and the chocolate drink that inevitable followed, were first consumed by the Mayans. Ancient Mayan pots with remnants point to Honduras as being another hot drink origin. Finally botanists suggesting tea first grew wild in Assam, India. Of course the drink was cultivated by the Chinese, and now there are the largest crops grown in India, Southern China and Sri Lanka. All of which are hot places.



So what are they doing drinking such hot beverages in these hot locations? Well I’ve read one theory that these places originally were quite rustic, and water was boiled to clear out organic contaminates. If you put your ingredients (tea leaves, coffee, or chocolate) inside to flavour the water, would you want to wait for it to cool down first? Still, I have my doubts. In some of the hottest places, the liquid would take its sweet time to cool, and would end up not cooling all that much. So, rather than decontamination, would people drink it hot to cool themselves down? Would it really work?



Theory would suggest that no, it can't. It would then suggest that yes, it can.
After hearing about the act of drinking a hot liquid on a hot day numerous of times, I decided to do a little research. There are lots of theories on why it would work – and why it wouldn't.
Some would say a cold drink is simply better, because your body puts its own heat into it.
Then I'd read hot drinks would work better because your body doesn’t have to heat the liquid up, therefore using less energy.
Cold drinks will cool you down through you core body.
Hot drinks will warm the body, to equal the heat you feel on your skin, and that would feel less intense.
The back and forth continued on.

But the best theory, the one that had some science to it, was that a hot drink heats up the core of your body. Your brain, which is hypersensitive to the temperature of your body’s core, reacts by putting the rest of your body into hyper self-cooling mode: mostly by sweating.
So the sweat helps cool your body, but it isn’t all that much better than cooling down your core via a cold drink instead.


So then, what will you do? Will you go the way of many South Americans and have their ice tea? I personally don’t like it because of the lack of sugar. The Canadian version I prefer, but to me it doesn’t even belong in the category of tea – the taste is so dissimilar. What about taking one of my hot teas with all the fixin’s and putting it into the fridge for later? Like an iced coffee? Well luckily for me I found a company willing to do that for me.


I saw this in a grocery store and had to buy it. It's made with tea extract and powdered milk.
It tastes awful.
Of course it does, and I was expecting it. But, more importantly, there was also a wrongness of the coldness. Ever distractedly drink from a mug of cold tea that you’d forgotten about while surfing the internet? It is gross and this is the same. The only tea beverage that could be cold and tasty would be Chai, and I have personally had very good frozen chai’s before.

It looks like a hot tea will be the only solution for my afternoon tea, but it can’t be just any tea. It has to be a summer inspired tea. Luckily for me, Murchie’s recently came out with a new tea called Coconut Cream Banana.

Coconut and banana are the main players, but it also has the smooth flavour of vanilla, and everything mixes so perfectly together. This doesn’t taste like artificial coconut that invades many of our baked culinary foods. It doesn’t taste like bad artificial banana you find in terrible hard candies. It tastes like you are in a hammock in the tropics, and someone just offered you a hot drink of paradise. It is by far my favourite tea I own at the moment, and I honestly had to keep from shouting “Day-O” between sips while drinking it. My mother can attest that I wasn’t always successful. My only complaint is that it is a very light tea : I have to let it steep quite a bit before it reached even a medium dark flavour and colour.



So if you are going to do something that feels completely unnatural – that is drink a hot beverage on a hot day—then at least find yourself a spectacular summer inspired tea. I obviously recommend this one, though I probably could drink Coconut Cream Banana tea on the sun and still be contented.

You can buy Murchie’s Coconut Cream Banana in store or online.
I don’t know if they will always carry it, as it could just be the fad of the season. It hasn’t gotten its own packaging yet, being sold only in bulk. Let’s hope it becomes a Murchie’s staple though.

You can find that Cold Earl Grey Boxed tea at grocery stores, though I found this one at T&T Supermarket. I don’t know why you’d want to, however.

Peaches vs Dairy

On the Vancouver wet west coast, there is a lot of rain. One might saw you could also go to a beach, and say there is a lot of sand. The first probably being truer.
Oh....I wish I could go to that beach. A sunny beach. A sunny warm beach with none of this whishy washy rain that might turn to snow but just remains cold and slushy.

So, what do you do when it is cold and miserable and you are craving the warm days of summer? Well, try drinking a summery tea for one thing! My boyfriend and I were at a small grocery store, and saw this lovely peach of a tea: Stash's Peach Black Tea!
Upon finding this tea, I was intrigued. It is a black tea, and you can add dairy and sugar to black tea. Could it be added to this tea?

Any tea drinker out there has added milk/cream to a nice cup of tea, and found it curdled up at the top at least once in their life. I personally had this experience with a blueberry herbal tea, and my mother made me drink it anyways. Even as a young girl I knew you could never put dairy in a citrus tea/tisane as that was just asking for it to chunk up, but blueberries?
(just a refresher, herbal teas aren't actually teas because they don't include the plant camellia sinensis—or tea. They should be called tisanes.)
Now I am no science teacher, and neither will I give you a science lesson, but I will say milk curdles because of the acidity in the blueberries, and that changes the pH in the milk/cream and causes it to coagulate.
In fact, all these fruits are acidic, and will most likely cause you milk/cream to curdle: apples, blueberries, cherries, grapes, grapefruit, nectarines, peaches, pears, pineapple, plums, and raspberries.

Another thing will cause dairy to curdle is pouring it right into boiling water. The heat will do the trick, even if you have a regular old black tea. If you find this a problem, add your milk/cream first, and add the boiling water slowly to gradually warm it up.
If you aren't putting milk into boiling water, you are drinking a regular old black tea, and it is still lumpy, then your milk/cream is bad. For goodness sake, throw that dairy out!

Now if you do make the citrus tea mistake, and you see your tea curdled, you can do one of three things:
1) Throw it out and start again. And this time, don't add any milk! Or use whole milk/cream, as it has a higher threshold for clumping.
2) Scoop out all the curds you can see. The milk/cream hasn't gone bad, just changed consistency. Water still tastes the same frozen, doesn't it? You might have to keep scooping throughout your drinking experience.
3) Just drink it all. The texture will be off, you might have to chew your tea, and you might not want to drink blueberry tisane ever again, but it won't kill you.


Well you might have noticed peaches in the list of acidic fruits. If you had a herbal tisane full of peaches and added milk/cream, it would curdle. But a black tea is a different sort of beast. To a point, you can add dairy to black teas and not have to worry about the consequences. On the other hand, some very bitter teas, or a strong Earl Grey(with the bergamot oils) will curdle milk.
Indeed, I was very curious about this tea.

Upon opening the box, I grew concerned. Ever open a bag of peach candies? That overwhelming PEACH smell? That's what greeted my nose. The smell was strong, but would it curdle the cream?
I made two cups, added sugar, and poured the cream in. It swirled, and twirled and mixed perfectly. No curdling! Got to love the black teas!

As for the actual tea? Well, it wasn't nearly as strong tasting as it smelled (they never are). By the time I put cream and sugar in it, it smelled like a peach perfume. Depending on the person, I suppose that could or could not be appetizing, The peach taste was there, but on the whole I think it would have made a better tisane.
What I am absolutely sure about, is that this tea would make an amazing iced tea come summer time. Oy.
Maybe I just need to go to a warm sunny beach now, and bring some Stash's Peach Black Tea with me.

Tea available at most grocery stores!