Tea Highlight: Smokey Teas

I don't remember when, exactly, I started drinking tea. There was a jump somewhere from hot toddies to brewing a pot in my family's china tea pot every afternoon. (In retrospect, I'm baffled that this was allowed, but I guess my parents preferred it get used than sit in the cabinet looking pretty.) Usually green tea, but occasionally a breakfast blend or whatever loose leaf I'd picked up from the local coffee shop that week. I tried to make it a habit to grab something new or unfamiliar on a regular basis, and I highly recommend this as a way of figuring out what you like in pretty much any food genre.

When I finally encountered Russian Caravan, I thought I'd encountered a lifelong favorite. Russian Caravan is a delicious and malty black tea blend that's lightly smoked, mimicking the flavor of teas arriving in Russia from China back when caravans were the actual means of transport. The stories go that because it was a long trip and the wagons would circle the fire at night, the tea arrived faintly smoked, and so that flavor is what people began to expect and appreciate. These days the tea is smoked deliberately, often including a blend of smoked and unsmoked to keep the flavor on the subtle end. It goes well with a hint of sweetness, in my experience, and a friend of mine once found some rum infused Russian Caravan that was absolutely wonderful.

The true king of smoked teas, however, and a frequent component of Russian Caravan blends, is lapsang souchong. Lapsang souchong has always been deliberately smoked over pine wood fires, and the moment I encountered it Russian Caravan lost its position as my favorite tea. I even remember my first cup of it. I was at a local ice cream and coffee shop on one of my spare wandering afternoons, and I noticed that their tea selection that day included a type I'd never heard of before. By this point that wasn't something that happened often, so I immediately ordered it. (Alongside an apple crumble a la mode, because this place made amazing ones.) It arrived in a giant glass mug, as all of their tea did, and as it darkened and reddened it smelled like nothing more or less than campfire smoke and summer evenings in the woods. I probably curled my hands around it and smelled it for longer than it took to drink it. And I was pleasantly surprised that though the smoke was absolutely present in the tea itself, it had all the depth and maltiness of my favorite oolong and black tea blends. It smelled like fire and tasted like fall.

Since then I've heard people refer to lapsang souchong as everything from "that bacon tea" to "that one that smells like road tar?" and I've concerned more than one coworker who mistook my morning caffeine intake with the office being on fire. It's not to everyone's taste, but I recommend it to anyone and everyone who enjoys tea, because if you like it at all you'll have a favorite tea for life.