Soy chai, kere kere, University of Melbourne

Yes, detox over, back on the chai. Chais are one of the few things I've missed over the past few weeks, and I'm happily adding it back to my beverage world, albeit sans honey for the moment.

This morning's chai was from kere kere, a unique little coffee stand on the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus (near John Medley West for those passing through the Dream Large 'hood). The brainchild of Unimelb alumnus James (well he looks like a James...), the kere kere menu is limited to hot drinks, water bottles and a changing array or baked goods, but the quality is consistent, the service genuine and it's fast become the mid-morning haunt of most break-seeking staff and caffeine-deprived students on campus.

Like Astroboy, kere kere is small but only in size. The beauty of this business is that you get to choose where the profits of your tea (or caffe latte, short mac, raspberry friand, etc) go. You can allocated these funds back to the owners, or to an environmental, social or cultural cause. When you place your order, you're given a on oversized playing card. This serves as the order number they'll call out when your tea's ready, but doubles as your vote for where the profits will go. Each month James (he could also pass for a David...) adds up the profits and distributes them according to how people have 'voted' throughout the month. It's a pretty neat idea and seems to have captured the support of many regulars -- they've recently had to add a second machine to help keep up with the steady flow of orders.

On campus? Check them out when you can -- you can even take in your own mug and go that extra step on the environmental staircase.

Peppermint tea, Carlton (Lit review)

Technically, I'm having hot water. Not a tea, not even a tisane, just hot water. It seems that I forgot to put the peppermint tea into my mug and I've just been drinking hot water. I've had so much peppermint tea lately that my taste buds have numbed to its flavour and I can't tell the difference between tea and hot water. This is definitely the most interesting discovery yielded so far from this tea reseach project.

[Not that this is a 'tea research project', just that I need a legitimate segue into my next, pre-written paragraph]

Now all good research projects (woohoo!) start with a literature review of the existing discourse surrounding a chosen subject matter. As many who know me will agree, I suck at reseach (and don't have the Masters to prove it...) so didn't bother doing a lit review before I started this blog. However, I've since spent time researching other people's tea blogs in an effort to (a) make sure that my own blog is somewhat original in its content and (b) plagiarise some of the better but harder-to-find ideas into my own work.

I made some interesting discoveries:

Tea Blog

This blog was created by a London artist who documented her single predominant thought while drinking every tea she had over a three-year period. Crazy artists. Technically not so much a tea blog as a 'set of hot beverage sticky notes', the site is colour-coded to show her thoughts while drinking 'normal tea', Earl Grey tea, coffee, hot chocolate and other hot treats. Thoughts include "I bet I get carried away and start bidding for things I really don't want (cup-o-soup*)", "I hope those roast potatoes don't make me feel too drowsy (coffee [my predominant thought here was whether she drank the coffee to combat the awesome power of the roast potatoes])" and "Now you come to mention it, it's pretty easy to believe that scientifically tea has no taste, just smell (normal tea)." Given this cup of hot water I'm currently drinking, she just might be onto something.

*Points off for including Aldi-brand cup-o-soups and miso in her tea blog ("It's a meal!"), and for "How can I justify this as a hot beverage?" not being her predominant thought while consuming Lemsip.

Points awarded, however, for setting an end date to the project. I feel better knowing that while she spent countless hours blogging such mundane thoughts, she eventually intended to return to a normal social life. Her final blog reads "31 December 2008: just think of all the free time I'll have when I finally don't have to bother updating the blog anymore." Amen.

After this, I got bored with the lit review and gave up. Much like the one I started in 2005...

Chai 101

The one thing I think I'll reintroduce into my life once this detox is over is probably soy chai. I've gone long periods without it, but it's one of the few self-indulgences I have (another is Dr Katz marathons and perhaps, one day, actual marathons) and I think I'll probably return to it in a few weeks.

There are three classifications of chai tea (to my knowledge), though it's likely that sub-classifications can be found. These are:

(a) Class A chai: this means that when you order a chai tea, the person making your tea uses leaves. They may strain these out for you, or you may be presented with a pot and strainer yourself, but you have been given caffeinated black tea leaves with a selection of spices. You may also have varying milk:water ratios, but it's still the good shit. I personally will make this tea on the stove with a ratio of 1:0 (or, arguably, 3.72:0), and stir till the milk warms up, any added honey has dissolved, the milk has turned a light brown and I'm satisfied that if I were to turn the heat off and leave it there for ten minutes, the top of the milk would develop that solidified 'skin' that you can peel off and use to scare people with.

One of the best Class A chais can be found at Mr Tulk in Melbourne, or possibly some northern New South Wales hippy festival.

(b) Class B chai: many cafes use this now, particularly to make a 'chai latte'. It involves dissolving liquid chai concentrate into hot water to make a 'chai shot', then adding steamed milk as you would to a regular cafe latte. You can then add honey or sprinkle with nutmeg/cinnamon. This, to me, is not real chai, but if done well will suffice till you can get home, put the stove on and chase your boyfriend around the house with the above-mentioned 'milk-skin'. If a Class B chai is done badly, you'll leave wondering why you paid $4 for what is essentially hot soy milk, and possibly not even of the Bonsoy variety. But there are several Melbourne cafes that do these chais well. Watch this space for details!

Two recommended Class B chais: Kere Kere, University of Melbourne (it's a suburb, deal with it!) and Atomica in Fitzroy.

(c) Class C chai: this isn't so much chai as "I-can't-believe-it's-not-hot-chocolate". I first discovered this type of chai at Brunetti in Carlton, and thought it was a delightful, creamy version of Class B chai. So delicious that you didn't even need a drop of honey (if honey has drops) and it came with a free biscuit! After a few return visits, I watched them make it -- it comes in the form of a powder, which methinks is largely sugar. They add this to steamed milk to make the tea (oh, who am I fooling, it's not a tea at all...). I'm pretty healthy-ish, so this chai falls into the pointy bit of what I call The Chai Pyramid -- let's call it a 'sometimes tea'. Saved for special times like when your job is frightfully frustrating, you're procrastinating from doing a load of whites or you're celebrating getting through all 13 discs of Dr Katz.

If you'd like to reward yourself with a Class C chai, try Brunetti on Faraday Street (not the Swanston Street one), The Potter on Swanston Street (part of the Ian Potter Museum of Art) or that little 90s sandwich store on Bouverie Street in Carlton.

Not that I believe in class systems.

Peppermint tea, Brunetti, Carlton

I'm still on the detox. And I'm still drinking peppermint tea. Blurgh. Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid fan of peppermint tea and would miss it if Australia experienced The Great Peppermint Famine of 2009, but it seems to be all I'm having these days and you can get sick of it. It's like if you filled a large vat with Labrador puppies, jumped inside and lived there for 10 days -- you'd soon become sick of those cute Kleenex commercials.

(Speaking of Labradors, last night I dreamt that I was in a pet store with 'free range' puppies and kittens. One of the Labrador puppies had skin made from puff pastry and had been sitting under heating lamps for too long. He had started to literally cook and looked like a Brumby's sausage roll at 4.30pm. I don't think he had any egg wash on him either. R thinks I'm just craving meat, but I'm resisting the idea that my subconscious is translating 'meat' into 'Labrador puppy flesh' -- watch out Tosh!).

People react to the news that you're doing a detox in the same way that they react to you telling them that you're into Scientology or eating toddlers (not that I've told anyone that I'm into eating toddlers...). Most people just think that feeling healthy is something you do because your doctor has told you to or you're a sadist who likes to deprive yourself of good things. I'm neither, I just adore the feeling of not being dependent on anything -- caffeine, post-meal sugar rushes, Labrador puppy eat, etc -- and I always feel great afterwards.

Now, mind you, this time I'm doing the piss-weakest detox of them all, the Blackmores Detox. This lasts for 10 days, involves taking lots of pills and tonics and just means you eat lots of fresh fruit and vegies (and some fish), and no caffeine, alcohol, sweets, dairy or wheat. And it's not that hard to keep up after the detox is over -- I discovered wheat-free muesli during Detox 2008 and have had it every morning since. You also realise just how great fresh food tastes without salt or sauces or oil -- during last year's detox I discovered that rocket tastes peppery! How could I not have known this?!

I can also somehow have sashimi and miso, so am meeting R today to binge on Japanese from Toki in Carlton. I could easily survive the 10 days on sashimi and miso, but it would set me back about $250.

Who wants to discuss Grant Show?

Oddly, I'm writing this inaugural blog more than 14 months after I created the site and promised R that I'd create a blog-girlfriend to metaphorically date his tri-daily discussions about the coffee world.

Oddlier (yes that's a word...), I'm writing this post (finally) while on detox and forbidden from drinking most teas.

So, instead of writing a long post about how many cups of peppermint tea you can make from just one scoop of leaves in a 7.25 hour work day, I'll explain what this blog's about, what you can expect to find here, who 'you' are as I doubt anyone will ever read this (unless I blog about "Jennifer Aniston + John Mayer" and then someone might google it by accident), and how I'll employ a stunningly accurate use of punctuation to make it easier for you ('you') to read my uber-long sentence structures.

So who wants to discuss Grant Show?

If you're a reader of R's coffee blog, you might remember a post dated 14 February 2009 aptly titled "Latte, Brunetti, Carlton". It contained the words "spin-off coming soon" and a photo of not only a latte but a take-away soy chai (and part of a face with a particularly bad hair cut that I've since outgrown). Not that you can tell it's a soy chai, but still. The spin-off reference referred (as references often do) to my promise to (finally) start my tea blog about that very cup of chai. I referred to that cup as "the Grant Show of the blogging world." As you'll all hopefully recall, Grant Show appeared in Beverley Hills 90210 in 1992 as Jake Hansen and then 'span-off'/'spin-offed' to Melrose Place (and, later, Models Inc.) to play a major character and share his own adventures with viewers.

This is the spin-off. Like in Joss Whedon's Buffy and Angel, a tea may turn up in a post about coffee, and vice-versa, but ultimately this is where I'll blog about my many theories about tea, my observations about Melbourne cafe culture, and shameless attempts to get free Gunpowder Green leaves from T2.

In the Melbourne cafe system, the story of tea is represented by two separate yet equally important players: the drinker, who consumes the tea, and the tea itself without which there'd be none of itself to drink (or something).

These are their stories.