Pinkies Out

This misty morning. King St., Charleston, SC

I'm a tea drinker from a long line of tea drinkers. I apologize to my dental hygienist for steeping my teeth in black tea all year and make her earn her keep. I'm not a connoisseur. I happily drink gallons of Lipton tea from a chipped black Pirate mug. When I dash into the Terrace Theater for my Friday matinee, Mike, the owner nods to his staff behind the counter, "Hot Tea. Black. Earl Grey!"

People are finally catching on to the fact that I only drink black tea and I got a good haul this holiday season. I'm drinking Pure Ceylon English Breakfast this morning and have bags of loose leaf Assam and China Gunpowder to follow. Every once and while my sister Barbra tracks down a bag of Meghalaya Tea from the hills in India where we grew up. It has been so hard for folks to resist giving me herbal, floral, fruity teas that this entry by Denise at Uniquely Tea had me cracking up.

This is a monologue from George Carlin's book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

Fruit-flavored Teas
"I would like to talk to you about fruit-flavored teas. These would be teas that are flavored like fruit. Fruit-flavored teas. You need to understand that. These are not fruits. They’re teas.

But they taste like fruit. All right? They have names like strawberry kiwi, lemon berry, orange mango, wild cherry, blackberry and cranberry. They taste like fruit. And they sound like fruits, too, don’t they? They’re not. They’re teas. Fruit-flavored teas. And frankly, I don’t understand this.

Personally, I’ve always been of a mind that if you’re looking for fruit flavor, if you’re genuinely interested in something that tastes like fruit, and you find yourself in the tea section, you’re probably in the wrong aisle.

My advice is, if it’s fruit flavor you’re after, play if safe, go ahead and get some fruit. I have found in my experience that fruit almost always turns out to be reliable source of fruit flavor.

Another good place you may wish to look for fruit flavor would be in fruit juice. Fruit juice is made by squeezing the juice out of the fruit. Apparently, the juice that runs out of the fruit has fruit flavor. Perhaps that’s why they call if fruit juice. It doesn’t taste like tea. For tea taste, you would need to get some tea.

So let’s sum this up: If it’s fruit flavor you want, you can’t go wrong with fruit. Or, as I’ve pointed out, fruit juice. Don’t be ordering tea. Tea has tea flavor. It’s not like fruit. It’s more like tea. If you want tea, I say order tea. That’s a different experience. It’s known as “having tea.”

Have you noticed, by the way, there are no tea-flavored fruits? Take a clue from nature.”