How do you drink a $75.00 per lb. Tea?

Carefully. Very carefully. If I had my hands on it then I’d dry the tea leaves after use to re-use them. But then that’s me. I am a type of guy who tries to preserve his dead presidents like the way the ancient Egyptians preserved (mummified) their dead pharaohs for eternity.

One of my colleagues orders this exotic tea from China which costs her a fortune per pack. Around $75.00 per pound. And to flaunt the exclusivity, the tea bag displays your name stating, “Lydia’s Tea prepared by so and so.”, that is, if your name is Lydia. What’s so special about this tea? For starters, if you put your hands in the bag and try to pick one of the tea leaves, you won’t get a usual burnt, processed and a very delicate strand of tea leaf. Instead, you’ll get a ball that looks more like a pepper seed than a tea leaf. To top it all the ball smells more like a flower and less like tea. In this case, a jasmine flower. For a guy who thinks who knows his tea, this was mighty strange. My patient colleague explained that this is a handrolled tea leaf ball which covers a seed of jasmine. I've heard of handrolled Cuban cigars but handrolled tea leaves? Whoa! that stretching things a bit too far! Why? So that the tea will have an additional fragrance of jasmine. So when you put a teaspoon of this tea in hot water you will not just smell the tea but also the fragrance of jasmine. Which means that while drinking tea you can also think of a pretty girl. Which means that if you have cold, better keep the tea bag sealed. And the tea if it has to be sipped (and not just smelled), should be drunk with hot water (optimum temperature unknown at the time of writing this article...) without any sugar or milk. Any impurity (such as milk or sugar) spoils the delicate flavor. Any tea which does not have lots of milk and lots of sugar spoils my taste. That’s one more good excuse for me to keep away from it. Anyways, it seems that they can prepare this special bag of tea in almost all the natural flavors available and while shipping, put your name (like the engraving on iPods, I suppose) on the tea bag. Amazing. So how would I drink this tea? I suppose I wouldn’t. I’d stay away from it. Or I'd steal the tea bag from a discerning tea drinker and demand a king's ransom in exchange. I value my dead presidents.

P.S. Tea connoisseurs, yes, you can order this tea on the internet.