The Levels of Tea Experience
By William I. Lengeman III
All due respect and perhaps apologies are due to William James, who wrote an influential book just over a century ago, called The Varieties of Religious Experience. You can approach tea from many different directions and there’s hardly one true and proper path. But like most things in life, you typically have to start at the bottom and work your way up through the ranks.
Novice - Most tea drinkers start here, although if you grow up in one of those countries where tea is integral to the culture, you’ve already got a leg up on most of us. Growing up in a suburban middle-class American home, my notion of tea was this weird powdery stuff that you scooped from a big jar and added to water. Is it any wonder...