Some people drink tea and some people drink coffee. Why not drink both? It wasn’t until a few years ago that I really started to drink tea. I drank coffee quite often and still do, but tea was different. Sure I drank iced tea or sweet tea, but never even really thought of hot tea unless I went to a Chinese restaurant and drank it almost as a gimmick. My wife on the other hand loves hot tea and drank it quite often. She is the one that got me interested in tea and it grows on me more and more everyday.
What is a tea?
Technically tea must be made from the tea plant (Camelia Sinensis which can be green, black, oolong, white, etc). Tea is a beverage made by pouring hot or boiling water over fresh tea leaves and steeping the leaves in the water for a period of time. True teas would always have caffeine in it as the tea plant contains caffeine. Tea actually used to be eaten as well though it doesn’t seem to appetizing to me.
It is quite interesting that we call herbal “teas” like our Kung Flu Crush or Sleepy Joe’s Tea a tea at all when they really are not. These are technically what is called tisanes. These teas while delicious have no actual tea leaves and are a concoction of different herbs, spices and fruits. This also means most herbal teas have no caffeine though there are a few that do like those with yerba mate.
This may ruffle a few feathers, but by this same logic could we not also call coffee, “Coffee Tea”. Who is the ones making the rules on this stuff?
Caffeine: Tea vs. Coffee
First off there are decaffeinated teas as well as decaffeinated coffee. If you can’t have caffeine there are options either way. Any standard coffee and any true tea is going to have caffeine. Most all herbal teas are naturally caffeine free so if you have an issue with caffeine and herbal tea may actually be the best bet for you. Are you just wanting to get the drink with the most caffeine? Well in that case don’t drink either coffee or tea and go with an energy drink. Lets take a look at the actual difference in caffeine from some of these drinks. The easiest way is to put it in a small infographic below. As you can see if you just want to go with the ultimate in caffeine don’t go with tea or coffee. That Redline drink will probably get your blood pressure red lining and straight to the hospital. Jokes aside in coffee the caffeine is pretty consistent across a cup, whereas in tea it can vary greatly. A black tea depending on how brewed can actually be range from 40s all the way up to 90 mg. So coffee and tea can be relatively close in caffeine levels. Another very interesting fact is that tea leaves contain 3.5% caffeine while coffee beans have 1.1-2.2% caffeine. The brewing process with coffee will often extract more of the caffeine though than tea brewing.
Types of teas vs coffee
On this site we obviously sell both true teas and herbal teas and these are pretty commonly lumped together so we will be talking about both. Though I do love a good cup of coffee and believe there are differences in taste, the spectrum of flavor has to go to tea. Even the difference between a green tea and a black tea can be pretty drastic. Then if we go from say a dirty chai tea (like the Don’t Tread on Tea) to a chamomile lavender (like the Sleepy Joe’s Tea) you can’t even really compare the two as they are in total different ball parks. Even comparing one herbal tea to another can be drastically different.
What do we think?
So what do we think you should drink? Well we are a tea company, but we do push freedom. How about this? You make the decision and we will trust you that it was the best decision for you as we aren’t your mommy and daddy. As far as for us we love them both. We drink both of them almost on the daily. Josh usually drinks coffee in the morning and then may finish off his day with a nice cup of Kung Flu Crush.
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