For those of you that REALLY know us……… this comes as a bit of a shock. You read that right. I’ve been in denial for a long, long time but am pretty certain I have an allergy to coffee. After many attempts at testing the theory out – without milk, without sugar……. with other types of sweetener etc. seems to result in the same thing — headaches and sinus pressure.
Started researching tea. A whole new world opened up to unlimited possibilities. My wife Karen had to get ready for marathon taste testings!! (Over our many years of marriage she has gotten used to my quirks of comparing coffee beans from different roasters. Our favorite by the way was KLATCH.)
Bought tea samplers from different suppliers online and locally: green, roobois, honeybush, herbal, fancy custom blends with dried fruits, berries……..even CANDY CANE!….. black, assam, flavored black, gunpowder, dragon pearls, raw pu-erh, aged pu-erh, chocolate pu-erh (from loose, to brick to tuocha, to cake)……. different regions, years……. the works. Karen almost fell over when I showed her this video:
Yes, I even bought the Purple Clay Pu-erh tea set to try. Guess what……. there is something to the disposing of the first steep on the pu-erh !!!!! More on that later.
We unplugged our grinder and our espresso machine – and it’s been a few months coffee cold turkey. I feel SO much better. Karen misses her mochas……. especially the hearts I would draw in with chocolate sauce……. but she likes the variety since she’s pretty much set on ONE bean that she loves.
I did buy a Zojirushi Water Boiler for nice hot water at the perfect temperature, and it’s been really handy for more than just tea.
The largest surprise came after 5 months of our Elektra commercial espresso machine being unplugged…. we got a notice from APS stating that we will be now having a $176 a month REDUCTION in our bill to even out our ‘equalizer’ plan! Over the past few years we’d been changing all our bulbs to LED to save energy and was starting to see some savings – but nothing this dramatic until we turned off our espresso machine. We used to keep it ‘on’ 24/7 and it ate up electricity we knew, but didn’t realize just how much.
We’ll blog more about some great teas we discover – but so far in terms of companies we like to order from includes:
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