Tea-a-tory

In our house, iced tea is serious business. There are complex rituals for making, rules for making and consuming, the issue of the frozen tea and the potential ill-effects of using the incorrect tea-bag. Let me explain: the boy and the manz are drinkers of iced-tea. While I like iced tea, I limit my consumption to a restaurant treat and happily drink my toxic water at home. Occasionally I will have a cup of hot tea, which will come up later in the conversation.

According to the manz, the law of tea is: he who drinks tea makes his own tea. Therefore both boy and man have separate tea pitchers and are the sole consumers and creators (in theory) of the tea in their pitchers. I, however, break the rule by feeling sorry for he-who-is-out-of-tea, and I will make a 'sympathy' pitcher of tea.... and if I make a sympathy pitcher for one, I have to make one for the other etc. It's easiest if I just avoid tea-making all together.... (but sometimes I cave...)

The way of making tea: in the coffee-maker designated for tea-only, there are 4 tea bags. That gets mixed while hot with 4 scoops sugar for boy-tea, 5 scoops sugar for manz tea (the manz pitcher is larger, therefore the greater sugar amount). Then it is shaken - not stirred- then filled to the top with water, let sit until it is room temperature, then put into the fridge.

Frozen tea is much the same initial process, but the smaller bottles are filled halfway up, then placed upright in the freezer. They are then filled to the top with regular unfrozen tea on roadshow days, providing for cold tea all day. Trick is though to carefully manage *whose* tea is used to fill the bottles, both for freezing and for topping off.... because I usually do this while the fellows are loading the heavy stuff, someone usually ends up with an empty tea pitcher which brings us back to the making of a sympathy pitcher etc.

Today I made the frozen tea, but Grendel was making his own tea.... and decided to get all creative and use the tea in the Raspberry tea-tin. Normally this would be ok- but what he didn't know is that I had used all the raspberry tea earlier and was using the tin to store my Chinese herbal tea- tea that is guaranteed to 'aid the female system by relieving stress and cleansing the body'... in other words, it makes you sleepy and gassy. He happily made his iced tea with this...lucky I saw the tin on the counter (the Chinese tea actually tastes a bit like raspberries- and allot like seaweed) and prevented him from drinking it- sleepy gassy boys are not good for business, and if I had used this blend to top off the frozen teas tomorrow... well, it wouldn't of been pretty.