Welcome

First of all let me welcome you on my blog. I decided to dedicate it to tea. You have been drinking it, I am sure. It is one of world's most popular beverages. Have you ever wondered what is tea exactly? Tea is a beverage made by steeping processed leaves, buds, or twigs of the tea bush, Camellia sinensis, in hot water for a few minutes.
It is also importnat to mention term „herbal tea“. This beverage does not include tea plant. It is a mixture of different herbs, flowers, fruit, root of plants. It does not contain caffeine.
Tea (Camellia sinensis) is an evergreen plant. To enable easy plucking (harvesting) tea plant is kept to a size of around 1 meter. If untouched tea plants can grow to a height of 15 meters. Tea plant can live for more than 100 years.
Several factors contribute to the flavour of tea – the region, type of soil, terrain, altitude, climate, the time of the year the tea is plucked and even the direction of the wind. Experts think that the best tea is made of the two uppermost tender, young leaves and a small unopened bud. They are called "two leaves and a bud"
More than 3 000 varieties of tea are known. Four of those are regarded as basic: black tea, oolong tea, green tea and white tea. Tea is a natural source of the amino acid theanine, methylxanthines like caffeine and theobromine, and polyphenolic antioxidant catechins. It includes almost no carbohydrates, fat and protein.
History of tea is really long. Tea is being drank for at least 5000 years. There are even some stories about the way tea was discovered. The first one bring us to 2737 BC China which was then ruled by the Emperor Shennong. He liked his drinking water boiled before he drank it so it would be clean, so that is what his servants did. One day, on a trip to a distant region, he and his army stopped to rest. A servant began boiling water for him to drink, and a dead leaf from the wild tea bush fell into the water. It turned a brownish colour, but it was unnoticed and presented to the emperor anyways. The emperor drank it and found it very refreshing, and cha (tea) was born.
As to the second story presented at the web site of the United Kingdom tea council it is possible that tea was discovered by the Indian prince Bodhidharma who converted to Buddhism and in the sixth century and went to China to spread the word. He believed that it was necessary to stay awake constantly for meditation and prayer, and took to chewing leaves from the tea shrub, which acted as stimulant, helping him stay awake. (An alternative, more macabre version has Bodhidharma accidentally falling asleep, and upon waking cutting off his own eyelids in disgust at himself. He threw the eyelids away, and from them sprouted the first tea shrub.)