I shifted from morning tea to morning coffee about three years ago. It was a sad acquiescence to a societal norm, but life is guaranteed to chip away at our purities.
You could say that taking up the tea habit in my thirties was a ding at the purity of drinking nothing but water in the morning up ’til that point. I know some people my age who don’t caffeinate in the morning, never did, and I salute them.
On a recent work/leisure trip to Montreal, I had a decision to make: coffee or tea. Which one would suit my morning routine the best?
You see, I like to roll out of bed, drink two cups of water, make coffee, drink coffee in bed, do morning stuff, then start my day. I’d rather not make a trip down to the hotel lobby, but would if I have to.
One complicating factor, however, is my reliance on half-caf coffee, which isn’t widely available in Canada. If coffee is available for free in a hotel’s lobby, then I can mix the regular with decaf, and quickly head back to the room, no problem.
But not at the hotel on this trip. No, I would’ve had to go downstairs, order coffee from the restaurant, ask them to make it half-caf, and bring it back to my room to add soy milk. That’s too much human interaction for me so early in the morning.
The room had a single-cup Keurig machine. This would have to be part of the solution. Being that half-caf pods aren’t sold at the nearest IGA, I planned to drink tea for the week and was looking forward to it.
Canada is a tea country. By that, I mean that its tea culture aligns more closely with other commonwealth countries, the countries that value a black tea that takes milk well.
My choices included Red Rose, King Cole, and Tetley. Note that the Red Rose tea sold in Canada isn’t the same as its US counterpart. It’s a different company producing different tea under the same name for different markets.
I chose Red Rose because it came in a pack with the fewest number of tea bags (36 count), and I bought unsweetened soy milk to go with it. The next step was to prep the coffee maker. I also brought some green tea bags from home to drink in the afternoon.
To prevent latent coffee flavors that might affect my tea, I ran three cycles of plain water through the Keurig. The first cycle resulted in brownish water; the other two were all clear.
And that’s it. I enjoyed two cups of black tea in bed every morning while watching television (a luxury I don’t have in my bedroom at home) and doing Duolingo lessons. I followed that up with exercise and then got to work.
As someone who’s considering ditching the coffee habit and going back to strictly tea, I proved to myself that it was indeed possible and just as enjoyable. Could it be that the type of hot beverage isn’t as important as the ritual itself?Perhaps, but perhaps not.
At trip’s end, I left the remaining tea bags in the room for housekeeping to do with as they wished (along with a monetary tip, of course), then rejoined coffee-drinking society upon my return home.
