Making Tea

The first step to making the perfect cup of tea is selecting your leaf. Tea leaves are found growing most commonly along the Western Road between Shard and Zaldi Taipa or North Road, Barony Pass & Farmlands in Theren during the spring and summer only. So once the days start to grow long be sure to stock up! Foraging tea leaves requires roughly ninety ranks of foraging, though of course your other skills come into play as well.

If you have any experience with preparing herbs the steps to prepair tea leaves for use is much the same. The first step is to dry your fresh leaf in a wayard pyramid found at any alchemy shop around the Realms. To dry the leaf first be sure that it's day time and the sun is at least peeking through the clouds. Open your pyramid, put your leaves inside, close the pyramid and set it on the ground. It will hum every few rois to let you know that it's working. Once your leaves are fully dried the next step is to place them inside a mortar and use a pestal to crush them (CRUSH leaf in my mort with my pes). Once crushed you'll have "some crushed tea leaf". Now, the next steps will depend on if you are creating a flavored tea or a simple straight brew. We'll start with a guide to the simple tea.

The Simple Brew

• Some crushed tea leaf
• Water
• A jar or bowl (Alchemy supply shop)
• mixing stick (Alchemy supply shop)
• A vial (Clerical shop)
• A portable stove (Alchemy supply shop)
• Flint and knife (General store)
• Fuel for your fire (Alchemy supply or foraged)

Firstly, COUNT your tea leaf. This will be the total number of sips that your end tea will end up being, remember this number. If you have more than one dried then crushed leaf you can COMBINE leaf to make one larger piece. Place the tea leaf in your jar. The next part is of course, your water. I'll assume here that the average person has no experience in alchemy and so will suggest the best way to gather water. If you happen to already know this feel free to skip ahead. Because gathering water is really an overly complicated process and prone to mistakes being very careful with your actions pay off. Your first step is to be certain that you are near water. Stow your jar in one of your containers, your backpack for example. With your vial in your hand FILL my vial with water. Your vial now holds one part of water. POUR my vial in jar in my backpack. Repeat this process, counting each pour until you've poured water into your jar a number of times equal to the parts in your tea leaf.

Be careful with your wording here, the system is very touchy. I once had a friend try to gather water for me, each time finding his jar empty just to discover that he had been pouring the water over his back by mistake. Save yourself the frustration and embarrassment by stowing your jar in a container and being exact. NOTE: Oddly enough, the amount of water in your jar doesn't need to exactly equal the amount of tea when making a straight brew. You can have six parts tea and ten parts water, and always end up with six sips of tea when you're done. This changes with flavors, as you'll see when we get there.

Now that your tea leaf and water are safely in your jar it's time to get a fire going. Firstly, set your stove on the ground and open it. You can make a fire with charcoal which you can find at alchemy shops but simple sticks, branches and logs work just as well and cost you nothing. To make a fire you'll want to start out with a stick or branch placed inside your stove. Then with your flint in one hand a knife in the other LIGHT stick in stove with my flint. It should spark and start to burn. You'll want to add four or five more sticks, branches or logs into your stove to get the fire going good. (LITTLE KNOWN FACT: Logs burn longer than branches, branches longer than sticks. You can COUNT any of these to find out how many pieces they have. Sticks have only two parts to burn away, logs have forty. You do the math on burn time.) If you're planning on making more than one pot, keep an eye on your fire and keep stoking it with fuel as it burns away. Close your stove once done and place your jar on top of it.

Now it's time to wait, if you have guests that you'll be serving now is a perfect time to bring up a topic of general interest to fill the space while the tea brews. After a moment you'll notice small puffs of steam escaping your jar, this is a sign that all is going well with your drink. After a few good bursts of steam feel free to give it a stir with your mixing stick. If you recieve a message that "there are too many items in your jar" it just means that it's not quite ready yet and it's time for more chatting. Once you are able to successfully stir your jar with your stick just as in alchemy you'll find finished tea in your jar.

Flavored Teas

There are a wealth of different flavors that you can add to your tea, most of these I myself have not come upon and I'd love to hear what sort of delightful flavors others have put together. For the sake of an example, I will guide you through making blueberry tea. The process for any flavor should be much the same. The tools you're need are the same as listed above but for a few extra steps and one new rule.

For our example blueberry tea you'll need of course, blueberries. This must be foraged, and not store boughten blueberries as those found in stores will not crush properly. The berries do not need to be dried. Simply place them in your mortar and crush them with your pestal as you would normally. You'll find that they separate into two items, blueberry juice and blueberry pulp. The pulp you may throw away (or eat, it's quite good spread on a muffin or plain toast) and the juice is what you are after for your tea making.

Flavored teas work a bit more like alchemy, using a 1:1:1 ratio. What this means is, you'll want an equal number of juice, water and crushed tea leaf. There are various ways to break, pour and combine these substances to get the right amounts and rather than detail them here I shall direct you to my favorite alchemy resource for guides on how get the proper numbers. I will run you through an example though.

COUNT your tea leaf, for sake of example let us say you have ten parts. You'll then want to count your juice, and be sure that as well has ten parts. Using the steps detailed above for counting parts of water you'll want to make ten pours from your vial to your jar. Once this is done, double check your counting by first looking in your jar then COUNT water in jar etc. to be certain you have an equal number of all. Once all three items are placed correctly in your jar it's the same process of heating, waiting and stirring until you find yourself with a yummy cup of blueberry tea.