Summer Doldrums

The older I get the more and more budget conscious I seem to get.  Thankfully on the plus side I have graduated over the years to better and more secure jobs allowing me to not quite reduce my tea spending, while reducing the percentage of money spent on tea.  This post is a twist of a post on something I seem to mention every fall.

I have mentioned several times before that I like cool weather for tea drinking not just because it is more comfortable to drink a warm/ hot beverage when you feel the need to warm up, but rather because when it is cold outside, we run our heaters.   I have realized that quite a few of my hobbies such as tea drinking and running technology for the purpose of crunching BOINC ( Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects generate heat, and a lot of heat.   When it is cold out that heat is a "useful" way to help heat my place.  By useful I mean it is not just running the heater for the purpose of generating heat, but rather the generation of heat serves another purpose.

That is all fine and dandy when it is cold outside, and you are trying to keep your place inside.  It makes no sense however when it is hot outside, and hot inside, and you are actively paying to run your AC to keep it cold inside.  I have not looked at the actually electricity consumption numbers for each appliance, but it seems really strange that I would pay to generate all sorts of heat in a computer constantly running or to bring a teapot to a boil, and at the same time pay for the electricity to run an air conditioner to cool the very same rooms that that heat is being generated in.  It gets even more screwy when you suddenly realize that you need to reboil more often the more often your AC is running! It really is enough to make your head spin!

So I am actually working on reducing my tea drinking this summer, and when possible brewing teas that can be brewed nicely with minimal reboils of the kettle.  Gaoshans as mentioned in my last post need heat, but if resteeping often enough can go 3-5 steeps without a reboil.  While the real ideal candidates are Sencha, Gyokuro, and Shincha which I have seemed to prefect  a system of brewing an entire session while only boiling the kettle once at the very beginning.  So these are the teas I am going to stick to this summer!