Tea or Coffee?

[Trash Man]

Tea, black with 1 sugar please

[Speed]

Tea, black with 1 sugar please

I have mine white, no sugar. Always have, guess that's down to what my parents have always liked.

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

Tea, Milk, Sugar.

My Dad takes it black with sugar and my Mum takes it with just milk.

I'll take the best of both worlds

[unrealuniverse]

i have to go coffee, even though i drink tea just as often. the main reason is that it seems to help me keep a very strange personality. other reasons are that it helps concentration whilst gaming and we only have decaffinated tea.

preference is coffee, white, 1 sugar. Tea is white, weak and no sugar.

[NiROE]

I voted for tea, mik, no sugar. Cant work without a cup of tea nearby

[5cupa]

decaffinated tea, white, 1 sweetner, 1/2 a sugar

[tiggerai]

decaffinated tea, white, 1 sweetner, 1/2 a sugar

What brand??

I only noticed the other day that PGtips do decaff now, the only drinkable one i could find was tetleys.

(decaff, white, 1 sugar, tea flavoured please!)

[bertie]

Double espresso with frothed milk for me

[shiato storm]

none of the above - hot chocolate with baileys please

[Byatt]

http://www.alan-partridge.co.uk/mult...e5Tea-cofe.mpg

[tim_n]

I am a snob.

Anyway

I do not drink instant coffee. I like tea AND coffee, and try most different types. Having working in a gourmet tea and coffee shop (and designed their website http://www.theteajunction.co.uk - I'd like it if that link remained, it's a lovely shop and I have no affiliation as such now) and tried all varieties of both tea and coffee.

I can say that I thoroughly dislike flavoured coffee. Bizarrely they actually marinate the beans in vats of the substance they are flavoured with (like highland whisky etc) though I'm unsure how they get christmas pudding flavour coffee. The only one I can recommend is the cinnamon flavoured one - that's lovely.

Unfortunately flavoured coffees loose a lot of caffeine in their washing process. Therefore I believe the figure is 6% caffeine, compared to 12% in non-processed beans.

The unflavoured coffee is much more my style. I enjoyed pretty much all the different types and blends of coffee. It's certainly nice to break open the new foil containers and sniff in that heavenly scent, especially as you're grinding the beans. Unfortunately with the hundreds of different scents you're bombarded with, you can't smell anything at all after an hour. Similarly, should you be working all day grinding, you don't want to see the stuff that comes out of your nose...

I tried all the expensive types of coffee (Pure Blue Mountain, Kona hawii etc) but one of my favorites was the italian roast. Nice and strong, worth drinking black and no bitterness. The longer the bean is roasted, the more bitter the coffee. Another one was the Guatamala Elephant bean - gorgeous! :- )

I'm more of a daytime tea drinker. I will accept cups of PG tips - though the tea is more or less fine floor sweepings. My favorite drink was Darjeeling SFTGFOP 1st Flush 2003. Not something to add milk to :- )

Russian carvan was nice, but I don't get on with the smokier teas. On the green teas my favorite is still jasmine tea (lovely stuff, packed full of good stuff for you, something like opiates or anti-oxidants or something

I did once travel to the Yixing teahouse in singapore http://www.yixingxuan-teahouse.com and chatted with the guy in the photo. He has a real appreciation of a good cup of tea. I bought one of their teasets and shipped it back. It's very relaxing - if you're in singapore, it's very worth a visit. Order lots of their little packages of food, I've never tasted anything so good!

In conclusion, I like both tea and coffee - the better the quality as possible. I like coffee first thing in the morning. It's good for my Asthma & getting that brain into gear. Tea helps sooth me through the day and break my thirst.

The ceremonial teaset comes out when I need to relax :- )

[RoGuE|SaBeR]

I think that's the most information I've ever seen on tea and coffee! Here was me thinking Tetley was the be all and end all.

[tim_n]

That was a brief overview :- ) don't get me started...

[MPDmike]

Tim N seems to know a thing or two about these beverages.

My local coffee shop once offered some small bags of real Blue Mountain for sale, but it was something like 4 times the price of the other coffees. Apparently the Japanese were buying it all up and the price had rocketed. The guy in the shop squeezed the bag so that I could sniff the contents - but that's as near as I got to drinking the stuff. It was probably overated, and in any case a mild flavoured coffee when compared to Santos high roast.

You pays your money and you takes your choices. I guess the most expensive beans are the ones that have passed throught intestines of a goat on some Himalayan mountainside.

Mike S.

[Elspuddy]

tea! milk and one, thanks

[tim_n]

rofl

pure jamaican blue mountain is supposidly the best coffee in the world (as drunk by Mr James Bond). It retails at around £7.95 for 100g - about 90p a cup. When it came into the shop I worked at, it came in small 2.5kg resealable bags - you don't sell much unless it's Christmas.

Having been privilaged enough to have drunk some on the launch of their website (the equivilant of champagne I suppose...) I can say this:

It is a very smooth cup of coffee with absolutely no bitterness. It is very drinkable and has a completely different after affect to normal bogstandard coffee - I felt more or less relaxed after it. It is quite low in caffeine.

The coffee itself is grown on one side on one mountain on one plantation of the blue mountains in Jamaica (afaik). Should you ever visit the coffee plantations, be wary of local touts trying to sell you coffee there - only buy from source, if it's cheap, it's not blue mountain. Coffees grown as high up as pure blue have less caffeine and bitterness apparently - the higher the coffee the better. I believe that pure blue is the highest, but I may be wrong.

Also be wary of shops selling blue mountain blend coffee (rather than Pure Jamaican Blue Mountain). It contains nil pure blue in it.

European union was rumoured to change the name of it because the mountains aren't actually blue.

There, what would you do without me... I'm off to have a cup of coffee.