Nothing Beats a Great Cup of Tea
As a drink dating back to an early Chinese emperor about 2700 B.C., tea has a long and varied history. It is older than coffee and about the same age, maybe a tad younger, than beer. As wine now dates back to the Neolithic era due to fairly recent research, it has tea beat hands down as the oldest beverage. However, tea has been around for a long time.
In addition to being old, tea is a very popular product. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the yield in 2006 was about 3.6 million tonnes. When you consider it takes only about two grams of tea to make a cup of tea, you can see we are swimming in it.
Does that tea you are drinking have less caffeine than coffee? Well, that depends. A 6-ounce cup of tea can have a lot or a little. It varies based upon what kind of tea you are drinking and how long you let it steep. The most seems to be about 110 milligrams in a cup of black tea. Black tea generally has more caffeine than green tea but not always.
Drinking tea will also provide you with some health benefits. While drinking, you are ingesting antioxidants which have been shown to protect people from Alzheimer’s disease per the Phytotherapy Research magazine. You are also getting minerals which are essential for growing bones and homeostasis of the body. This doesn’t even count what the vitamins do for you.
Certainly most people don’t care about all the many benefits to tea, even if that is why they first started to drink it. After a time, it simply becomes a way of life because it is simply a wonderful beverage. There are so many wonderful types of tea and if you add in herbal teas, or tisanes, the varieties are almost endless.
Throughout time, tea drinking has been both a personal delight for individuals as well as the center of social ceremonies. The tea dance soon followed the opening of the first tea shop in London in the late 1800s. It has even been the center of political unrest as the Boston Tea Party is perhaps the best example.
While many parts of the world can and will disagree on many things from mode of dress to lifestyle to favorite foods, one things most will agree upon is the enjoyable cup of tea. Eastern philosophy and Western dictates may clash many times as we have seen through history, but the drinking of tea as a pleasurable experience is not one of them.
You can brew your tea in a clay pot or a floral Staffordshire teapot. You can use tea bags or loose tea. You can serve it in glass cups or the finest china., But one thing the many, many people around the world who drink tea know. Tea is irresistible.
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