A Nice Cuppa

Tell me what kind of tea you drink, and I???ll tell you what kind of person you are. That claim may sound like some sort of New Age hokum you???d expect from a guy who lives near Woodstock, New York, where yogis and Feng Shui consultants almost outnumber carpenters and financial consultants. Still, the adage may hold a cup???s worth of truth.

Whether you???re a tea-craze newbie or a tea-todlin??? veteran, what kind–and even what color–of tea you prefer might say some things about your personality.

Paint it Black, You Risk-Taker
Sip a cup of smooth pu-erh black tea, whose leaves intentionally aged like wine appear in limited editions, and you may dash off to Costa Rica next week for a spontaneous vacation or leap into a new lover???s arms. So implies Diana Rosen, a lifelong tea fan and author of several tea books including Meditations with Tea: Paths to Inner Peace (Citadel Press). ???The more exclusive limited teas,??? she said in a recent telephone interview, ???match up with those people who are adventurous and willing to take new risks in their lives.???

Miriam Novalle–tea seller, tea advocate extraordinaire, and proprietor of the ever-hip T Salon in New York City–agrees with Rosen adding this twist: ???Parisians love to buy my Jingshan from Thailand, and they love my Ancient Beauty (tea grown in China 14,000 feet up). Hard to find, exotic. The French love that.???

Another Shade of Pale?
Another showcase tea that attracts the exotic-prone sipper, Rosen says, may be white peony. This delicate tea, which lightens and clears the mind, comes from leaves plucked in China sometimes only on two days of the year just before the buds open. If you???re a peony drinker, you may be more willing to change that stagnant job or drop that tired habit.

Agnes Devereux, who opened the Village Tea Room in New York???s Hudson Valley in 2004, has a slightly different take on peony drinkers. Because this mellow tea???s subtle flavor eludes some tea drinker???s taste buds, peony fans are willing to concentrate on the taste of the tea itself. Call it the thinking person???s tea. ???It???s not for everyone,??? she says. TSalon regular and daring actress Uma Thurman apparently loves her white teas, according to Novalle.

Any Green Health Nuts Here?
Do you favor a stock green tea, the favorite among the Japanese and Chinese? Say, Sencha tea whose dark green leaves typically come from Japan???s mountaintops or Gunpowder green tea whose pellet leaves hail from China? Both Devereux and Rosen suggest that as an American green tea drinker you may be the health-conscious, pragmatic type who drinks tea to clean your teeth, free your body of cancer agents, and bolster your mind from Alzheimer???s early onset. You???re likely a vegetarian, too.

No harm there, according to Rosen, also the author of Taking Time for Tea (Storey Books), but some ???healthy??? green tea drinkers ???may forget that drinking tea is about using all of the senses and helps the body relax.??? In other words, if we gulp a cup of green tea like a green tea capsule, we may be perpetuating the stressed lifestyle that some cancers crave and that drinking tea can reverse.

Some green tea, though, appeals to more than the cold- and cancer-fearing crowd. Macha, a finely processed and powdered green tea used in traditional Japanese and Zen tea ceremonies, attracts high achievers with focus. If you???re a monk with a mission, then macha???s your match. Powerhouse cook Masaharu Morimoto (also known as The Iron Chef) relishes his macha, what Novalle calls ???a very high energized, clear-to-the-point, high-octane tea.???

Red for the Red-Eyed Scribes?
Hard workers, especially we slaves to the electronic word, also have their preferences. ???A lot of writers come in at the end of the day,??? Novalle says, ???and are ready to chill and get to bed. Just wind down.??? Red rooibos tea, she says, appeals to the industrious set. A caffeine-free tea that comes from South Africa and that contains many of green tea???s health benefits, red rooibos does just the trick to send off the wearied writer dreaming into the night.

The Male Factor?
Do real men drink tea? According to Devereux, generally speaking, most men who come to the Village Tea Room savor a black tea???s robust hearty style. ???Many men view fruity, floral teas as anemic or like a soda,??? she says. Joshua Pearl, who leads ???tea happenings??? of music and tea in Woodstock, has a friend who always wants a big black cup of tea to ???kick him in the ass.??? Call it the black bear tea syndrome.

When asked about this correlation, TSalon owner Novalle said, ???You have to remember, I get everything from the robust male to the gay male who loves floral teas.??? There goes that theory. Yet, she does note that the smoky chai teas typically attract the contemplative, intense male (or an occasional woman with a strong personality). ???I have a famous therapist who always takes his smoky chai. The smoky tea drinker you can picture sporting a beard and smoking a pipe.???

Play it Safe?
If you rely upon your Earl Grey breakfast tea, the standard afternoon version for the Brits and the sandwich-and-scone set, then neither risk-taking nor ass-kicking virility may be your cup of tea. Rosen has her views, too, about these tea todlers. ???They???ve found a comfort in life,??? she says, ???and want certainty.???

But such might be true for any of us who return to the same type, the same brand morning after morning, afternoon upon afternoon. So, beware if you think that your daily cup of Yogi Tea???s Mystic Darjeeling means you???re the wanderlust traveler who will rise with the cobras and groove with the swamis. Actually, if the Mystic black tea has been your flava??? for the past three months, perhaps you???ve slipped into a comfortable, predictable rut.

Variety keeps us and our cuppa fresh.

Tea, Desire, and Remembrance of Things Past
Maybe we???re asking the wrong question, though. Perhaps the type of tea we drink is less a mirror of our personality than of what we thirst for. What we drink may be not who we are but what we desire.

Devereux agrees. Take her husband, for example (who also, by the way, has no time for ???foo-foo fruity drinks???). Also from Ireland, he favors a robust black tea blend–Berry???s Classic Blend straight from his heartland. ???I think he???s probably yearning for something from his past,??? Devereux says, ???trying to recapture something from his childhood.???

In fact, Devereux notes that many of us, regardless of our preferred tea type, may be thirsting to sip some special time in our childhood when we would ???sit down and take a break and talk with adults.???

Childhood memories seem to swirl in tea cups, warm and womb-like round. No coincidence then that the pivotal moment in Proust???s epic of memory–Remembrance of Things Past–comes when he dips a madeleine cake in tea. ???No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate,??? he recalls, ???than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.??? Overwhelmed with an ???all-powerful joy,??? a moment of sensual wonder in which mortality???s pain and tragedy???s power vanish, Proust avails his present circumstances to his rich childhood memories.

???90% of enjoying eating and drinking,??? Rosen says, ???is memory.??? Adding milk and sugar to black teas, she says, reflects a desire for ???the comfort and sweetness (no pun intended) of childhood.???

That pull to the past may be stored in the leaf. When I recently attended one of Joshua Pearl???s tea happenings, most of the dozen participants recounted some fuzzy memory of attending childhood tea parties, snuggling next to a mother on a winter???s day to relax and chat over a cup of tea, or of connecting to the adult world via tea cups. In a telephone interview, Pearl said he thinks this childhood connection cuts across green, white, and black teas–all of which come from the same leaf: the camellia sinensis. ???It???s in the power of the leaf itself,??? he says with no irony. That leaf, he says, contains ancient ???vitality, healing, and comfort???–all qualities we???d like to hold from our childhood.

(For this Texas-bred boy, by the way, my childhood only conjures Lipton iced tea that never suited my finicky tastes even when heaps of sugar snowed down the tall glass. No Proustian moments of childhood ecstasy.)

And what desires swirl among the curbed Earl Grey crowd? ???Without a doubt,??? Rosen claims, ???nine out of ten of these Americans would like to put themselves next to Jane Austen or even Charles Dickens or Queen Victoria.??? (Or maybe Oscar Wilde?) What are they yearning for? ???A life of elegance and beauty and manners,??? she says–a hint of derision in her voice for those Americans who can???t quite wean themselves from their British cultural parents.

In an age in which Howard Stern models how we speak to one another, in which raw ???urban lit??? of sex and drugs and raunchy language has become St. Martin???s Press??? latest publishing hook, and in which shopping strips of Gaps and Starbucks with faux-Old-Time fronts blight our streets, maybe these Anglophiles don???t have such a bad idea.

A Cuppa Rainbow Tea
Here???s what I???m yearning for: a Hip-Hop Tea Salon, an edgy salon that brings tea???s elegance and subtlety to a ???hood near you where Dickens chats with Tupac over a cup of Green Dragonswell, where troubled youth read Hamlet over a cup of chai, where my auto mechanic can Zen-out with a cup of White Spider Legs tea and a Li Po poem.

I???m yearning for nothing short of a veritable cuppa rainbow tea.

But as Proust reminds us, ???It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.???

What about you? What type of tea do you prefer? What does your preference say about you? Your personality? Your desire? Send me a message, and we???ll start gathering the data and connect in this Virtual Hip-Hop Tea Salon.