One of my new year resolutions was to cut down on coffee. So, as part of a hot-beverage-with-caffeine maintenance programme, I went back to my first addiction: tea. Unfortunately, tea and I had been apart too long, and we were struggling to reignite the relationship. Which is when I read about a new (to me, anyway) and exciting tea variety, known as Silver Needle.
Silver Needle was the height of café-society sophistication, apparently. It took its name from the downy, uppermost buds of the tea plant, which are picked on only two days of the year, dried in the sun, and then laid under a bed of jasmine flowers for a week. Needless to say, such sophistication did not come cheap.
Silver Needle was also "probably the most expensive [ tea] in the world," according to a source quoted in the Daily Telegraph. A café in Edinburgh charged £20 a pot for it, while Claridges in London offered a knock-down version for £10. "Absolutely fabulous", a Claridges spokesman called it.
It took me a while to find Silver Needle in Dublin. Then I chanced upon a tea and coffee stall in George's Street Arcade that looked promising. There was no Silver Needle among the teas displayed. But when I asked for it by name, sure enough the man produced some from under the counter. This, of course, just added to the thrill.
The taste was "a bit delicate", he warned, with what might have been a hint that I didn't look the type. But I barely noticed this in my excitement to get home and drink it. When he let me have two ounces for only €4, it felt like a steal.
On cost grounds alone, Silver Needle would not have recommended itself to that famous tea addict, Samuel Johnson. The great lexicographer was wont to have 25 cups at one sitting, and once described himself as: "a hardened and shameless tea drinker, whose kettle scarcely has time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning." But I had higher hopes of George Orwell's approval. So while waiting the recommended four minutes for my Silver Needle to brew through the metal infuser I had also invested in, I fetched out Orwell's celebrated essay A Nice Cup of Tea to re-read the principles he laid out on the subject. There were 11 principles, I recalled. And although he conceded that at least four were "acutely controversial", he regarded them all as non-negotiable.
Sadly, Silver Needle fell at the very first fence, by being Chinese. Chinese tea had its virtues, Orwell wrote, but stimulation wasn't one of them. "One does not feel wiser, braver, or more optimistic after drinking it," he declared. Anyone who used the phrase "a nice cup of tea" invariably meant one of the Indian varieties.
That rather reduced the relevance of principles 2 to 11, but I read them again anyway. Rule 4 concerned the horrors of weak tea. "All true tea-lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year," he wrote. To this end, Rule 5 stated that you could achieve proper infusion only in the absence of "strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea".
I had already broken rule 2 by not using a pot (and therefore rule 3, by not heating the pot on a hob, rather than swilling hot water in it). As for strength, even after four minutes the Silver Needle had barely coloured the water in the mug. I doubted if freeing it from its metal prison would make much difference.
Orwell's ninth and tenth principles concerned milk. He believed in pouring off the cream, but he also held strongly that the tea should go in first. This was the most controversial point, he admitted, granting that "the milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments" (which he thought were always outweighed by the risk of putting in too much).
Indeed, one of the virtues he did attribute to Chinese tea was that it could be drunk without milk. Science has since proved him right about this, as about so many things, since the latest studies suggest that milk cancels out the health benefits of the antioxidants in tea. To that extent he might have approved of Silver Needle. And to the extent that the latter should be drunk without sugar, he might have approved too. Orwell was strongly anti-sugar. "I know very well that I am in a minority here," he wrote. "But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour?" Tea was meant to be bitter, he thought, just like beer.
On this score too, however, Silver Needle falls down badly. While I couldn't agree with the connoisseurs who call it "sweet", it certainly has none of the astringency of black tea. And while it is in no way objectionable, it is not quite the event that either its price tag or the Claridges spokesman suggests.
Orwell wrote his essay at a time of post-war shortages, and justified his obsessive approach to tea on the grounds that attention to detail was necessary "to make quite sure of wringing out of one's ration the 20 good, strong cups that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent".
For all its virtues (it is both low in caffeine and high in antioxidants) I doubt if my two ounces of Silver Needle, however handled, could be wrung into one strong cup of tea. But while I did not feel any braver or more optimistic after drinking it, I did feel slightly wiser. It'll be back to the Barry's Gold Label from here on.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie