It's no secret that I'm a pretty big dork about tea and am especially in to brewing up loose leaf tea as opposed to bags. It's also no secret that tea from the Assam region in India is one of the most sought after types due to it being absolutely delicious, but there are very strange discrepancies in the fact that there is more Assam sold than the region can actually produce. What this means is that the tea from other regions is regularly blended with Assam a bit under the table.
One of the teas often used for blending is from the fields that grow in Kenya.
There are those who gripe about how they can't really ever get in to Kenyan tea and how it just doesn't taste like an English Breakfast tea. I happen to absolutely love straight Kenyan tea as it has a deep, dark, earthy quality to it that is excellent when sipped slowly. To those who easily dismiss Kenya tea, ironically there is most likely a good deal of Kenyan leaves in whatever cup you're drinking. They grow and export a lot of it and that being the case, I was lucky enough to have Becky take me on a trip up to the tea growing fields where she originally grew up some distance outside of Nairobi.
If you've never seen tea fields before, they're really wonderful to look at. The tea spreads out in these verdant low-lying bushes from which the leaves are picked. As you can see above, it may look like fun for an aromatic romp through lush emerald fields, but there are two interesting things about tea fields. First, tea plants are incredibly scrubby and unfriendly. Walking through a field of them will really scratch you up. Secondly, despite the lovely smells that tea can produce when you open a fresh back of loose leaf to steep; the fields are almost completely without any smell whatsoever. If it's raining, you'll just smell wet earth. It seems almost impossible, but all the qualities loved about tea come in from the aging process which produces the white, green, oolong, or black variants.
Due to Nairobi Rain Traffic (yes, it deserves capitalization), it wasn't a long visit up there and much like wine vines, once you've seen one tea field, you've kinda seen them all, even though there are a great many coffee fields mixed in. I did manage to pick up 1kg of tea for 500 Shillings or about $7 USD. That's a pretty impressive deal and if I didn't have 15kg of wine from Cape Town in my suitcase already, I would have gotten more. As to the flavor? It's everything I expect in a Kenyan tea and I'm loving it as well as having gained a great new appreciation for how much hand work goes in to eat cup of tea I drink in the morning.
Bamako is severely lacking in bars and cafés. Coming from Côte d'Ivoire for this visit, it has taken a bit to get used to as the Malian culture doesn't seem to focus around this aspect of casual life as it does for the Ivorians. What you do see are a group of guys sitting around a small street stove that is boiling a pot of tea that they then serve, drinking with this slurping sound that quite honestly drives me a bit nuts, but seems to be the only way to drink tea here as it's quite hot once poured.
While my wife and I were rummaging through the many excellent jewelry shops just West of the center (I highly recommend checking them out if in Bamako), I noticed that the owners of one shop understood very well how convection works in fires. Obviously having grown tired of fanning the flames, which I know is quite a bother when I'm firing up in the barbecue back home, they decided to use a forge.
Now, I'm not quite sure if this forge is generally used for jewelry making, but I only saw it used for tea making. Essentially, it's a raised bed of coals that sit above an air path that has air forced in to it by a blower they picked up from lord knows where, that they crank with a re-purposed bicycle wheel. In a word, it's a genius as it works exceedingly well. For those familiar with how a forge typically works, they've greatly improved upon the hand-pumped bellows. It heats up the coals and thus, the tea, incredibly fast.
I love tea and so of course I took the chance to try the Malian take on boiling the magic leaves. Mother if it's not strong. It's like an espresso shot in each of those small glasses. It's highly bitter as well which is most likely why they sweeten the bejesus out of it. It's still good though, in the way that Turkish coffee is good and this touch with the forge makes it all the more cool.
Coffee drinkers the world over are well-known for needing their coffee fix wherever they might be. This can lead to rather burdensome life requirements of course as was shown by a friend of a friend who took an entire espresso machine with him when he went to DR Congo. He was Italian of course, so I have a great deal of respect for the attention to detail.
I never really got in to coffee. It's not to say that I don't like it, as I do enjoy a dark, straight cup as they make it in Spain, Bosnia, or Turkey, but at the same time, I just really don't need it. And I really don't need that whipped cream, cinnamon sprinkled joke they pass off as coffee at places like Starbucks.
Snicker as you may (or if British, nod in approval) but I happen to be much more of a tea fan. This is fine when in Eastern Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, or a number of other African countries that have vast, wonderful tea fields, but when traveling at large, you often have to BYOT (Bring Your Own Tea.) For instance, when in Ghana, I found that there was indeed Lipton and it was better than the bagged version you get in the US, but it still just wasn't quite "there". If you lob the phrase "tea snob" at me, I probably won't duck it at this point as I've just had so many crappy cups of tea while traveling that I generally pass if it doesn't seem up to snuff. I'll try not to sneer if in your company, but I make no promises.
The travel woes changed a great deal with the discovery of this bad boy, which is a very portable tea leaf infuser that's rather affordable. It's large enough to let the tea steep properly, unlike the ball, but small enough to fit anywhere. Naturally one might be looking at this and thinking, "Um, buddy, why don't you just travel bag-enabled?" I did this for awhile, but I have to be honest with you in that once you go loose, you can't go bag; thank you very much, Fortnum & Mason Assam. I assume it's something along the same lines as grinding your own coffee beans prior to brewing.
But that's about it. I can take this little fellow with me anywhere and it will span just about any cup. I can bring my own leaves or just try what is locally grown. Boil up some water, send it my way, and you've got a happy tea drinker. Bill, I'm hoping to get over your way soon to try some Cameroonian tea as well and I will be there, infuser in hand.
I have to admit that this was all inspired by this article on Twiga which shows that you absolutely don't need to go the fancy infuser route and may very easily find a local metal smith that can construct one out of recycled materials. But, just a bit of travel tea-lore for some of my fellow drinkers out there who might be staying in the shadows because it seems that few folks write about tea and travel as if one excludes the other, to which I say, "Hardly!"
