This post is about /t/

We're in the process of making some changes to the tea blag.  We no longer have the moist, herbal essence background that was so arousing.  Instead, we have a more appropriate tea background.  Also, the font might change soon to something like Comic Sans.  Tea_Pain is excite.

Once You Go Black...

I know what you're thinking. Should I wear the blue shirt or the red shirt for New Years Eve. You're debating the colors because it's still close to Christmas, so red still works. However the blue shirt is guaranteed to get you laid because its worked in the past.

Forget about it. You're not getting laid on NYE because you smell like the Doritos you spill on yourself everyday, and no girl wants to go back to your mom's place.  The only love you're getting is from Jill (your right hand).

I know what you're gonna say. "Duke, I use my left hand; I'm left-handed." Bullshit. No one is left handed. That's a myth propagated by children with cerebral palsy who weren't lucky enough to be killed at a young age like the left-handed kids.  You lying SOBs can wear either shirt and see if anyone gives a fuck.  I'll just pour my tea on it anyway.

So I'm finally in a bad mood again, thanks to direct infusion of black tea into my system.  Two days of assam and darjeeling therapy have washed all but trace amounts of herbal tea from my system.  OMGDARJEELINGREVIEW. Please. I'll save that one for when me and Tea_Pain get back from the North Pole with enough baby seal blubber. Today you get to hear about a staple black tea, Tazo Awake. 

Awake is nothing special, but it's also not total pissass.  As the package says "Lolz melange of black teas n stuffs." It certainly is Timmy.  Awake is like the two-buck chuck of tea.  Its a blend of various black teas like two-buck is a blend of various grapes.  "WHAT? THEY BLEND GRAPES?" Yes Timmy.  It makes different shitty grapes taste better.  You can make decent wine out of any crappy grapes because the flavors become homogeneous.  "Herrpa durrrr what's homogeneous mean?"  Essentially the shit gets spread out instead of being a big chunky pile in the middle of Tea_Pain's bedroom carpet last Halloween.  The point is that Awake is solid, and it's cheap enough.  It gets the job done just like two-buck chuck gets girls to forget how ugly you are.

Minus manliness for having French on the package.  Go take a shower you frogs.  You smell like Lipton.

TL;DR

What: Awake (Tazo)

How much: $6 per box (24 bags)

What kind: Black - blend

Taste: Like good tea blended with water from a dish rag

Repeat Drinkability: 7.5/10

Manliness: 5.5/10 (this is Amurrica you speak Anglish)

Sincerely,

DukeOEarl

/t/hat's Amore

I'm white. I'm suburban. I must make a pilgrimage to Olive Garden. I feel that whenever I go into this establishment that it's slowly going the way of Pizza Hut and Applebee's- 500 pound behemoths ordering 4 dishes off the diet menu. I had stepped onto the set of Wall-E 2: Diabetic Boogaloo.

So the waitress came and took my drink order. Of course, I get the Peach Bellini tea. Pinky. Up. Bitches.

My reason? Exhibit A- Oh hey, this looks enjoyable and refreshing.

Let's be clear: when I order /t/ea, I want /t/ea; when I order sugar heroin, well, you get it. I'm more of a purist when it comes to taste, too much sugar and I'll dump it. So when I sipped this "tea" that was put in front of me, I was surprised. It tasted like tea. It looked like tea. It had some caffeine. It even has a friggen FROZEN PEACH in the glass instead of a lemon. These heathens, they spoil me!

As much as I wanted to believe what I was drinking was a glass of iced awesomeness, this being Olive Garden, I have many doubts. As far as I know, this tea was probably produced from a powder (a cardinal sin in my book). It had enough sugar to bake a cake, which is also bad. But the drink was somehow peach flavored, and I'm partial to it.

Overall, this was decent for restaurant tea. Though it was VERY artificially flavored, it was still enjoyable. I feel it falls in the gray area of what determines a tea. Does having the flavor, kick and look of tea make a drink a tea? I could see myself sitting in Olive Garden on a warm summer day watching the cattle graze on chicken marsala and three cheese ravioli while riding their electric wheelchairs. I just wouldn't do it often or else I'd become one of them. *Shudder*

TL;DR

What: Peach Bellini Iced Tea (Olive Garden)

How much: $3- all you can drink

What kind: Black- flavored, powdered(?)

Taste: Peach ring candy blended up and thrown in a vat of sweet tea. Sugar sugar sugar.

Repeat Drinkability: 9/10

Manliness: 5/10 (men LOVE getting diabetes)

Min/tea/ Explorations

Well my sister discovered my stigma for herbal teas because I complained endlessly about the lack of real tea in my mother’s house.  After the Pissass fiasco, I said that I’d rather steep dirt in hot water than any of the dried garbage available.  Anyway, she convinced me to try some of her herbal tea that is her absolute favorite.  She has a female-boner for this tea I guess.  Fuck it.  I already drank my own piss yesterday because I wasn’t about to try the Pissass again, so I decided to give it a taste.

The tea that makes her super horny is called Choice Organic Teas Organic Chamomile Spearmint.  Organic tea is organic.  In fact, it says “organic” five times on the little tea bag packet.  Who cares besides hippies and pretentious housewives?  No one.  Whatever, I’m just going to remove those unnecessary terms.  Let’s call it Choice Chamomile Spearmint.  Ok, now it’s got like a real tea name.  Hot water on--let’s do this.

After infusing, it looked sort of like my urine after a heavy night of drinking, minus the blood.  It smelled subtly of mint and bergamot.  I felt like I was in a shampoo commercial for a second.  I prepared myself for a spontaneous shower by tossing my hair back and inhaling the soothing aroma.  Then I realized I was a man again and just decided to drink the damn tea.  Surprisingly, it did not taste like the deer urine I spray myself with every hunting season.  It was rather good.  The subtle mint flavor complemented the flowery chamomile taste.  It was rather sweet without adding any honey, so it would be quite excellent with a lighter, flowery honey.  Considering it doesn’t have any caffeine, it has potential for repeat drinkability.  It still isn’t black tea though.

TL;DR

What: Chamomile Spearmint (Choice)

How much: $4.35 a box (20 tea bags)

What kind: Herbal - Chamomile

Taste: Like flowers and mint and sunshine

Repeat Drinkability: 5/10

Manliness: 3/10 (Sadly there is no bear on this one)

Sincerely,

DukeOEarl

PS No man should ever propose on facebook.  We might have to post about this later.

Home for /tea/ Holidays

Me and the Tea_Pain are visiting our respective families over break.  For about the first day or so, it's nice to see those annoying family members that you forgot about for a few months.  Then their personalities and gross body odors start to weigh on the mind and nasal glands.  Whatever I'll just drink some tea while they talk and make clever comments to illustrate my moral and intellectual superiority.  Anyway, this is a tea blag, and I am a tea blagger.  On to the tea!

For whatever reason, I decided that I would not bring my tea with me over break.  Bad idea.  As I was frantically searching around my mother’s kitchen for something caffeinated to wake up from my eggnog slumber, the only tea I came across was Bigelow Pomegranate Pizzazz.  God dammit mother, don’t you buy real tea?  “Whatever,” I thought, “it can’t be that bad.”  I lied to myself so that I would try it.  The purple/red colour (I’m British today) of the liquor got me strangely aroused—Freud would have a lot to say about me.  After drinking the fruity beverage, I had a strange urge to go with my sister to pilates class.  I resisted.  The warm tropical taste reminded me of Tea_Pain's holiday theme song.  I noticed the subtle bitter after taste of cheap orange peel in the background of the pomegranate herbal mix, which did not help the fruity flavor.  On top of that there was absolutely no caffeine in this tea.  Since waking up with bonus time, my drunken slumber was starting to possess me again.  Coffee to the rescue.  Yeah that’s right.  This tea is so bad that I had to resort to coffee, probably picked by some little African goat-herding child.  I’m going to call it Pomegranate Pissass from now on because that’s what it was like.  It tasted so much like piss that I resorted to the ass taste of coffee to mask the piss taste of the Pissass.

Ok time for presents.  Family time is fa la la la lame and ho ho hoverrated.  All I need are my two good friends Jack and Jim, and maybe some holiday cola to mix.  Yummy.  Try one over the holidays.

BTW Santa, all I want for Christmas is that chick from Pomplamoose.  Although could you change her name from “Nataly” to say “Natalie” so that it doesn't look like her parents are in-breed, illiterate hicks?

TL;DR

What: Pomegranate Pizzazz (Bigelow Pissass)

How much: Too much

What kind: Herbal - Pomegranate

Taste: Like some chick martini minus the booze

Repeat Drinkability: 2/10

Manliness: 0.5/10

Sincerely,

DukeOEarl

Boring Tea is Boring

I awoke from yet another dream featuring Lindsay Lohan and Tina Fey to find myself still un-satiated. I go downstairs to the place I keep all my chips, steaks, and potatoes and found a tin with a bear on it. I thought, Simply there must be BEAR TEA in here. And let's be honest, when you're a man just getting finished with a Mean Girls dream, you need to MAN THE FUCK UP, so bear tea it was.

I feel the brand name (Celestial Seasonings) works ironically well for this tea. You could drink this as tea... or you could use it to lightly season bacon to create a good bedtime snack. Overall, the tea tasted more like minty spit, pretty weak for an herbal. I considered taking another bag out of the tin, but the bear was sleeping, and I'll be damned if I force that bear out of the same dream I just had. If I added honey to this, it would be honey water. Though good, it still isn't tea. But the longer this bag steeped in my mug, the more the mint came out. Amazon says this is a chamomile tea. They are lying.

I'd say I could drink this upwards of once a month. There would have to be nothing but Diet Rite and milk in my house for this to happen (I hate both, just being clear). There are so many teas that are better than this, even Brisk. Celestial Seasonings makes a solid majority of their money off herbal teas. Either they make all of their "teas" with a slight hint of flavor or they make them taste so boring that you want to fall asleep afterward.

Oh... I see what you did there.

What: Sleepytime Herb Tea (Celestial Seasonings) and/or Bear Tea

How much: $0.10 a bag on Amazon

What kind: Herbal - Chamomile/Mint

Taste: Watered-down Throat Coat with a Double-Mint gum finish
Repeat Drinkability: 3/10

Manliness: 4/10 (you're lucky there's a bear on the front of this)

LifeSPLOSIONS

So let me be clear: herbal teas are like drinking O'Douls. Any time you brew some up you are immediately dumbfounded that you made such a poor life decision. That is why Duke and I will be assaulting our tastebuds with several different herbal teas over our break. I can imagine you're wondering, Why must you destroy the happiness and joy of America's holiday? Clearly we are taking on the part of being the trollish Grinches and suffering for you. That's right, in our herbal tea drinking and *judgement* we may actually be helping you. Merry Christmas, here's some Schadenfreude.


Oh, and followers, there will be pics. I imagine it would make things easier than saying, "Uh-herp, this one's a WHITE tea." With this added amount of work, we expect people to enjoy the ensuing contest: first one to realize a picture is actually a cup of piss wins Christmas. (Piss may actually be rated higher than some of the upcoming teas. This is unfortunate.)

Procras/tea/nating

Me and the Tea_Pain were recently avoiding our commitments to academia at the Macha Teahouse in Madison, WI. We were supposed to be studying for finals, but how hard is it to remember the four C's? Cut, clarity, communion, crabs. See that was easy, and I'm not even the one taking Gems400.

Anyways we got some of this dank-ass tea that smelled like Johnny Appleseed's man juice; it was some hand-mixed fall spice special that reminded me of my uncle's apple cider into which he would pour brandy. Tea_Pain grabbed some of that agave nectar to sweeten the tea a bit. My tongue tried to choke me. Get that fucking shit out of my tea. We got the honey. All was good. Honey is to agave as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is to Justin Beiber.

We can't remember what we talked about, but rest assured it was something awesome.

TL;DR

What: Fall Spice (Macha Teahouse Special Mix)

How much: $3.95 a pot (free refills on water)

What kind: Black – spiced

Taste: Like apple cider cocaine minus the apples and the cocaine
Repeat drinkability: 6/10 (the rating would be higher if it came in tea bags)

Manliness: 5.5/10

Sincerely,
DukeOEarl

Sup /tea/

DAMN IT, a dry heaving hooker would make my girlfriend wetter than our background. If I started rubbing my face against the monitor, I would get the feeling of being in an Herbal Essence commercial, orgasmic moaning and all. RaaaaaaaAAAAAGE Blogger, that's what I feel right now *shakes fist at heavens*.

Us: a couple of self-proclaimed trolls with an affinity for tea, reddit, and random sports nobody in America will ever love. We started our tea binges in 2007 at a few of the local Madison cafes. We'd shoot the shit and talk about Russian love interests, why Ashley is better than Mary-Kate, and how eventually we'd both be presidents of under-developed African nations. We would be caffeinated, we would talk about man things, life was sunshine, puppies and rainbows.

The blog: is a artform. Rather than focus strictly on how the oxidation process forced upon each leaf adds subtle flavors to a brew, we bring reviews based on our ideology of a perfect cup of tea(of which each of us have had about 2 in our lifetimes, maybe) as well as random ramblings throughout the week. This week, DukeOEarl might want to stab his roommate with a broken beer bottle. Next week, Tea_Pain might want to start an underground Iron Chef ring using only endangered animals. The opportunities for random, A.D.D.-inspired ideas will only be brought forth by drinking copious amounts of tea from whomever dares steep it.

TL;DR- We drink tea, we make fun of life.


Aight, I need me a FRESH POT

Tea_Pain


PS- all of you are sodamnlucky Comic Sans isn't an option for our font.
PPS- any ideas for teas are welcome. Yes, even you, Roundy's.