Tea Snobbery

I just got accepted into the Association of Tea Bloggers and seeing that they were doing a Blog Carnival I really wanted to participate, if only because it is a topic I would never write about otherwise. The topic was about the hardest place you have ever had to brew tea and how you overcame it. If you want to see the other articles they are all collected here. My first reaction to the topic was that I never have a hard time brewing tea, I even travel ready. But the longer I thought about it I had more stories than I knew what to do with. Honestly it really comes down to a really tight tie between high school and college. So I will try to make them both a little briefer than otherwise.

My high school was not like other high schools. We didn’t have a building, all we had were portables and a rented space to put them all. This means we had no cafeteria, we relied on the generosity of parents to donate microwaves to us and being high schoolers microwaves were practically disposable. Someone broke the microwave at least once a week one year. Mostly from putting tin foil in it. Water for the most part was dispensed from water coolers and we quickly got the hot water taken away from us when someone got into a fight and used a cup of hot water as their weapon of choice. This meant for the most part that brewing tea was going to be a problem. At the time all I had in terms of tea ware was a coffee cup and a tea kettle at my house. I had been taking tea to school with me and filling up on hot water all day from the water coolers. My coffee cup was not microwavable even if I had thought of doing that.

Instead I got ingenious. There was an unspoken rule at my school that if you were smart and got good grades you could get away with anything. There was also a rumor that the teachers still had the last bastion of hot water in their lounge. Now was the time to test the theory. I don’t know how I thought of it, but I asked the teacher in the class before lunch if I could leave class five minutes early from now on. He of course asked me what it was that I needed to do during that time. I didn’t lie, I told him I was going to go make tea in the teacher’s lounge. It worked. He even told me to tell other teachers that might be in there that I was sent by him. I of course tried this with a couple of other teachers as well through the day, and soon all the teachers just assumed I could go in and out of the teacher’s lounge as I liked.

That story has a lot less to do with tea though and more to do with the strange idiosyncrasies of my high school. The second hardest time I’ve had brewing tea was college and has a little more to do with tea. Instead of drinking alcohol on Friday nights like most college students we knew, my friends would gather together and have a tea party. Of course what this mostly meant was that we would gather together in one of the common rooms and make tea and talk. What we didn’t realize when we started doing this is that not all of the common rooms had kitchen’s attached to them. In addition to this, most of us didn’t have an electric tea kettle for one reason or another, in fact there were some parties where it was only by the grace of the one person who did have an electric tea kettle that any of us actually got any tea at the tea party. It would be funny though, because no matter where we were planned to gather we would show up, two to ten people with cups, teas, kettles or even more amusing sauce pans borrowed from our own common rooms. It was always sort of funny to see us converge and try to figure out who was making what, not to mention a little difficult. Before we really figured out that letting the person with the electric kettle take care of it was sometimes the best answer, we would be scrambling up and down stairs with cups of hot water and such and it often was not a good thing.

It seems my most difficult situations are getting the hot water. What is the most difficult situation under which you have brewed tea? What did you do to make it through the situation?