Doctor Strangebrew or: How I Learned To Stop Complaining and Love Tea [part 2]

 Again, all I have to say is thank god for Wegman's... if it weren't for their insane mission to stock as many amazing food products as they do, I wouldn't have become the avid tea drinker that I am. They're planning on opening new stores in Maryland and a bunch of people were complaining about how "un-green" they are and that they're trying to muscle out competition, but all those people need to shut up. To my knowledge, they were one of the first chain stores to not only carry Ito En products, but to sell them cheaper than anywhere else ($1.50 per 16.9oz bottle... suck on that Whole Foods!)




Anyway... so I had just gotten hip to drinking Japanese green tea, thanks to Ito En's Dr. Weil line of premium tea "shots". At that point I hadn't even ventured into the grocery store part of Wegman's, just their cafe/lunch area. When I finally did take the extra time on my lunch break to walk around the entire store, I found their tea bar (which blew my mind) and then the organic/health food section (which is like the size of an entire 7-11 or something). It was there that I first saw Ito En's Tea's Tea line of beverages.

They just look healthy, don't they? Once again it was that basic principle that led me to trying them, as well as the fact that you were getting nearly three times as much beverage for the price of one of the Dr. Weil shots. The Tea's Tea brand really helped me acclimate my taste to the astringency of green tea, especially in comparison to the over-sweetened black RTD (ready-to-drink) teas that I was familiar with: Snapple, Nestea, Lipton, etc. The different flavor additives is what really cinched it, because they would help cut the astringent/bitterness just enough to get you used to it. Specifically, it was the Jasmine Green that really won me over.

Ito En created this line of tea specifically to "convert" the US market, and it totally worked on me!

Back to Wegman's though... right next to the Tea's Tea was Oi Ocha.

At that moment all the pieces fell into place, as I recognized it as the drink that I had in Japan years before. I hadn't really noticed the Ito En logo up until then either, so once I realized that all these drinks were coming from the same company, it all made sense. It also blew my mind a little, because I have a terrible penchant for obsessing over authentic Japanese brands. So the fact that this "OG" Japanese tea company was selling their stuff in America was very appealing to me.

So that pretty much sums up how I began getting interested in tea, or at least how I became an Ito En fanboy. It was also around the same time though that I was discovering loose leaf tea in general; this was aided very much so by a girl that I had just started to date. She had been a somewhat regular tea drinker for awhile and it quickly became something else for us to bond over. For Christmas that year she got me a tea ball and four varieties of loose leaf to try: white peony, darjeeling, jasmine pearl and raspberry black (or something like that). It took me awhile to begin experimenting with loose leaf on my own though, and I remember just savoring the little containers she gave me.

Not too long after that Christmas though, she gave me something that made tea exponentially easier and fun to drink:

To be continued...