My friends, the tea snobs...

My friends in Portland (yeah, I know... here we go again) are absolute tea snobs. Dave worked at a tea bar for a long period of time, and Erica worked in the offices of a high end tea company in Portland (which says a lot, because tea is a big deal there). Every day that I stay at their condo, they offer me tea, both with breakfast and before bed. They have these two giant drawers in their kitchen, easily a foot and a half tall, two and a half feet wide, and three feet deep - and they're full of teas. Loose leaf only. They would not dream of drinking tea that was steeped with a tea bag. One of my many experiences with their variety of teas in those drawers led me to try puer. It's a fermented dark tea, and I must admit, it tastes like dirt. Really and truly. But for some reason, I like it. And Dave does, too. In fact, he LOVES it. Erica told me that she comes home at night sometimes to find him with a weird glint in his eye, reading books for his graduate school program in Buddhism, and she just knows he's been drinking it for the whole evening. His puer often comes from Tea Chai Te, which is a great tea shop in Portland (picture below).

She says that sometimes she hears him on the phone, talking to one of his friends about how to acquire special strains of puer that have been aged for decades and are no longer available commercially, with the air of a big drug deal that's about to go down. I guess there must be something worth it in the dirt-flavored beverage.