On Drinking Hot Tea & Coffee

There was a time when I drank hot tea...with a lot of sugar added to it. These are the same days when I drank black tea...& only black tea...for I didn't know of any other tea to try. I did know that I didn't care for coffee. I'd had a sip; yep, just one sip of coffee. I didn't think much of the beverage, so I never had anymore sips.

During my tweens, as they call that age nowadays, there was a time when I'd get up each morning before school, before Dad would leave for work, & I'd prepare his breakfast. This included prepping his mug of coffee. As the only coffee drinker in the house he drank a mug of instant coffee with his breakfast each morning. That's one heaping spoonful slightly rounded off. Then into the microwave it'd go for a minute thirty seconds.

It was during one of these mornings, likely more into my teens - during my high school years, when I'd have considered myself to be "old enough" to "try" & taste some coffee. I had a tiny rebel spirit & yet was so far from truly rebelling.

So as I mixed that spoonful of coffee into the boiling water in Dad's mug, I found myself drinking/licking the spoon dry. I wasn't satisfied with that sip. And I didn't want the caffeine addiction I knew many coffee & caffeine drinkers as having. I never bothered with coffee again.

Our house always had hot tea. When I was a very young girl our refrigerator & dinner table also included a container of iced tea. The iced tea container faded out of the scene by the time I'd hit double digits. It was on the occasions our family stopped for breakfast after church when we kids first began to enjoy a cup of hot tea. With sugar. Or is the saying, "Would you like some hot tea with that sugar?" In modeling our mother, at least two heaping, unrounded spoonfuls of sugar would be added to our mugs full of steaming hot tea before sending the sweet mixture down our throats. In those days restaurants only offered black tea when customers requested hot tea. And in those days Mom hadn't learned about the great impact of that sugar being in her hot tea, or her general diet, let alone to be able to educate her family.

Nowadays I don't care for the flavor of black tea. I also know that green tea (as well as white, red, & others) has more nutritional factors than black tea. These teas come in a wide variety of flavors - so flavorful, in fact, that adding sugar isn't a consideration.