Cafe Leila
1724 San Pablo Ave. (between Delaware and Virginia streets), Berkeley
For many Individuals, “tea and turmeric” don’t go collectively like scotch and soda. And even in Berkeley, most individuals wouldn’t consider grinding a wholesome dose of black pepper into their matcha latte.
And but for Cafe Leila proprietor Moses Abughosh — who was born within the Center East and has traveled the world learning tea — combining these unlikely components is the important thing to constructing a wholesome immune system and heading off illness. The ensuing concoctions — with names corresponding to Turmeric Matcha Latte and Irritation Buster — have turn out to be more and more widespread at his cafe over the course of the pandemic.
In China, Japan and plenty of different international locations, the medicinal worth of tea has been acknowledged and celebrated for hundreds of years. That’s not the case within the U.S., which is a coffee-drinking nation.
Abughosh grew up in a “tea tradition” in Palestine, in his namesake village of Abu Ghosh, about six miles west of Jerusalem. “If I had a abdomen ache, my mom would make tea,” he mentioned. “If I had red-eye, she brewed tea, dipped cotton in it, and put the cotton on my eye. If I used to be bruised, she brewed tea leaves and wrapped my arm” in a tea-infused towel. The truth is, Abughosh mentioned he concocted his first natural tea on the age of 10, when he had a abdomen ache. He brewed peppermint and sage in an effort to keep away from taking medication. And it labored.
“Tea was additionally one thing that introduced folks collectively the place I grew up,” Abughosh mentioned. “If that they had an enormous drawback, massive arguments, they bought collectively and drank tea and solved the issue.” In Center Jap tradition, tea is a drink of leisure and dialog. It’s common to customise the tea leaves by including mint, sage, rose leaves, or no matter is at hand, Abughosh mentioned. “In case you are supplied tea, you’re invited to drink and loosen up,” he mentioned. “Espresso is a goodbye drink. As soon as you’re supplied espresso, it means your go to has ended.”
A plethora of lattes
Abughosh estimates that he has created greater than 100 completely different blended tea drinks and lattes over the previous few a long time, “every for a special goal.” He provides greater than two dozen natural, honest commerce teas at Cafe Leila, together with a dozen kinds of tea lattes.
It seems that lattes were originally made with tea, and had been widespread in India as an inexpensive working man’s drink. The caffeine energized the employees, and the milk and sugar gave them gasoline, so the British colonists discovered it a helpful drink that elevated productiveness. Hippies introduced the lattes stateside within the ’60s, and Starbucks finally turned it into an costly espresso drink.
A few of Abughosh’s specialty drinks embody Turmeric Matcha, Candy Matcha Inexperienced Tea Latte, Blueberry Rooibos Pink Latte, Dulse Seaweed Matcha Latte, Hojicha Latte and Spirulina Matcha Latte. They arrive in an attractive number of colours — orange-yellow from the turmeric, green-blue from the seaweed algae, chocolate from the Rooibos. The lattes are ready with a selection of milk (common, soy, almond or oat).
The home-made Chai is the most well-liked of Cafe Leila’s specialty drinks, though it doesn’t style just like the chai of Indian eating places. This chai is a way more complicated drink that features 12 spices and takes two days to arrange, Abughosh mentioned. He begins with natural Darjeeling and Assam teas leaves, that are steeped for a full day.
The spices — which embody cayenne pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, coriander and extra — are then cooked individually and left to take a seat for 2 days. The tea and spices are then combined, and as soon as an order is positioned, the steamed milk is added.
When requested who was most certainly to purchase the tea lattes, Abughosh answered earlier than the query was even accomplished: “Girls,” he mentioned. “Girls over 30. They’re extra open to the well being advantages, and are on the lookout for merchandise which can be wholesome and never processed.”
Cafe Leila additionally provides “recent teas” made with out precise tea leaves, however with components corresponding to recent ginger, recent rosemary, honey, and lemon. The sorts of cures our grandmothers might need brewed.
The truth is, it was a private well being disaster that led Abughosh to develop an experience in tea. “I used to have a number of well being points, and I used to be sick for a very long time,” he mentioned. “I needed one thing beside prescribed drugs to heal me, and I began to experiment with teas and superfoods.” Abughosh attributes his eventual restoration to a yearlong tea routine.
Tea as a therapeutic elixir
Whereas there are dozens of articles concerning the well being advantages of tea (medical consultants are combined on the power of tea to remedy sickness by itself, however some early analysis on inexperienced tea suggests it’d include antioxidants that scale back irritation for some folks), this may not be information to conventional and Jap cultures. Japanese tradition, for instance, has traditionally seen tea “as a drugs with virtually divine properties,” in accordance with Alan MacFarlane, writer of The Empire of Tea. The Chinese language have historically grown tea alongside medicinal crops, to “take care of completely different complaints of the top, coronary heart, liver and abdomen,” he wrote.
Tea is exclusive in that it has each invigorating and enjoyable results. And since tea needs to be boiled, individuals who drank tea in non-industrialized societies tended to dwell longer than those that drank disease-laden recent water.
The truth is, tea was so priceless alongside the Silk Highway that “tea bricks” had been created and used as a type of forex. “It had one nice benefit over a silver coin or paper cash — if one had been determined, one might eat or drink it,” McFarlane wrote.
Tea is the second-most consumed drink on this planet, after water. And whereas Individuals drink virtually 3 times more coffee than tea, that stability is now shifting. Tea consumption has grown 20% within the U.S. over the previous 20 years, and folks below 30 now drink as a lot tea as espresso. Apparently, 70% of these over 65 favor espresso.
One plant, many teas
All tea really comes from one plant: the Camellia Sinensis. The 4 common classes of tea — white, inexperienced, Oolong, and black — are decided by the quantity of oxidation the tea leaf undergoes. (Oxidation is similar course of that makes the within of an apple flip brown after a couple of minutes, Abughosh mentioned.) Usually, the extra oxidized the tea is, the darker it will likely be: White tea and inexperienced teas are the least oxidized, whereas black tea has full oxidation of the leaves.
Abughosh considers himself a teaologist, though he readily concedes that there isn’t a precise certification for that designation. Teologists are individuals who have appreciable experience associated to teas, and may educate others about them. Along with a lifetime of touring the world and learning tea cultivation and tradition, Abughosh attends occasions such because the World Tea Convention & Expo.
“After I first began attending there have been perhaps 50 suppliers, and now it’s bloomed uncontrolled,” he mentioned. “There are over a thousand suppliers, and plenty of hundreds of attendees.”
Tea is now a $13 billion enterprise within the U.S. As a British colony, America really began out as a tea-drinking nation. However the taxes levied by England resulted within the Boston Tea Party, and the colonists had no selection however to start out ingesting coffee within the title of freedom.
From medication to beverage
“Tea started as a drugs and grew right into a beverage,” Kaduzo Okakura wrote a century in the past in The E-book of Tea. “Teaism is a cult based on the adoration of the gorgeous among the many sordid info of on a regular basis existence. … It’s primarily a worship of the Imperfect, as it’s a tender try to perform one thing doable on this inconceivable factor we all know as life.”
These phrases really feel as true in the present day as they had been then. Greatest to mull them over whereas ingesting a pleasant cup of tea. Possibly with some recent black pepper combined in.
