I love Coffee. But is Tea a viable alternative to my habit?

The Coffee Lover’s Guide To Tea

By Melanie Pinola over at Lifehacker

Coffee is great, but even die-hard coffee lovers might want to give tea a chance. The other beloved warm beverage, tea imparts to its drinkers some formidable health benefits, an extra boost of alertness without the same caffeine slump of coffee, and more variety. Here’s how to get started enjoying the best possible tea.

Why You Should Be Drinking Tea

 
Tea’s health benefits: Although coffee has been linked to some health benefits such as lower risk of certain types of cancer, there are also some negative effects associated with coffee, such as caffeine dependency. Deep down inside, heavy coffee drinkers suspect there is such a thing as too much coffee.
On the flip side, a great many more studies have attributed health benefits to tea, from reducing cancer risk to preventing obesity, and very few have proven negative tea-drinking effects (you can see a comparison of these two drinks’ health benefits in this infographic.)
 

Alertness without the caffeine crash: Tea can provide you with that alertness that coffee is known for — without the later caffeine slump or drop. Both drinks contain caffeine, but they vary in their amounts of caffeine (in general, coffee has more caffeine per cup than tea, but this can differ by tea varietal. In The Book of Coffee and Tea, Joel, David and Karl Schapira say that the extraction of coffee is nearly complete in the brewing of coffee, whereas a five-minute infusion of tea extracts only three-quarters of the caffeine).
Aside from the concentration of caffeine in a cup of coffee versus tea, there’s a difference in the way the caffeine in tea affects you compared to the caffeine in coffee (much like caffeine’s effects vary depending on genetics and other factors). One source, citing a coffee and tea industry publication, says that the other chemical compounds in coffee and tea — besides caffeine — can either enhance (in coffee’s case) or mute (in tea’s case) the effects of caffeine. The beneficial antioxidants, polyphenols, in tea may make the body absorb caffeine differently, over a longer period of time. So, while you might have to stop drinking coffee by noon to avoid sleep problems, you probably can go on drinking tea the rest of the day with no ill effects.
You’ll never get bored: Last but not least, tea is an exquisite and varied drink, ranging from the very subtle white teas to unique flavoured teas to more astringent black teas. If you enjoy experimenting with different coffee varietals’ tastes — pitting the acidic Guatemalan coffee beans against smoother and fuller-bodied Sumatra coffee — tea can provide you that wide world of exploration too… and then some.

What Teas To Drink?

Black teas in general may be better suited for coffee lovers because they have a stronger taste, but here are some more specific suggestions for teas that could suit your palate:
 

For bright teas to wake you up: Try some of the so-called “breakfast teas” like English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast. These are a blend of strong-tasting black teas, though there’s no consensus between one tea provider or another on what a breakfast blend consists of. Many Irish Breakfast teas use Assam tea leaves (tea from the Assam district in India), which produces a tea that is “pungent, malty tasting, and full-bodied and looks unusually dark,” according to James Norwood Pratt’s Tea Lover’s Treasury. The breakfast tea may make a nice alternative if you drink coffee for it’s eye-opening qualities.
Tea made from yerba mate, while not technically tea because it’s made from a plant other than Camellia sinensis, has a high caffeine concentration, perhaps even more than coffee, as well as potential antioxidant and anti-inflammatory health benefits. Photo by Andrew.
 

For distinctive flavours : No tea will replace the way coffee tastes, but if you want something more unusual and stronger than, say, the Lipton variety, consider Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong or Genmachai.
Earl Grey is a wildly popular and unique-tasting tea scented with the oil of bergamot. In general, Earl Grey teas are mild-flavoured and have a delicate scent, yet are at the same time quite distinctive.
Likewise, Lapsang Souchong is a love-it-or-hate-it sort of tea. It tastes like smoke (and is scented and flavoured with smoke). The tarry taste of this “manly” and dark tea may be an option for you if you think tea is too weak-tasting compared to coffee.
If you like nutty coffees like some Guatemalan coffees or nut-flavoured coffees (e.g. hazelnut coffee), you might enjoy Genmaicha, a Japanese green tea that adds roasted brown rice to the infusion for a stronger flavour often described as “popcorn-like”. Photo by Robin.

 

For balanced, healthy teas: Perhaps you don’t want a tea that matches coffee in its strong flavour, but is just a good plain tea. If you like the tea you usually get at Chinese restaurants, try Oolong tea, a cross between lighter-flavoured green and stronger black teas. Oolong has been called the “champagne of teas” and is characteristically a smooth, all-around refreshing tea. Photo by J Wynia.
 

For enjoying the ritual of the brew: If you enjoy the coffee-making process — e.g. brewing in a French press and watching the coffee grinds bloom — consider flowering teas. Flowering teas are hand-picked and hand-sewn tea leaves that unfurl and look like a blooming flower when brewed. They emphasise the art of making tea and the enjoyment of tea beyond just taste. Photo by Heather Katsoulis.

How to Make Great Tea

The basics of how to make a better cup of coffee also apply to tea: freshness, water quality, temperature and timing.
Freshness: Just as whole coffee beans that have been stored in a cool, dark place are best for making coffee, great tea should be stored as whole leaves (not grind into tea bags). The freshest, better quality teas are sold as whole leaf teas rather than crushed in tea bags.
Tea can last quite a bit longer than coffee when stored properly — as much as two years if not exposed to air, light, odour, heat or moisture; roasted coffee, by comparison, is best used within one to two weeks.
Water quality: Since both coffee and tea consist primarily (more than 90 per cent) of water, the quality of the water used to make these drinks is paramount. Start with fresh, cold water (not previously boiled or flat water), preferably filtered or bottled.
Temperature: Here’s where coffee and tea differ. The Specialty Coffee Association of America recommends a water temperature of 90C to 96C for coffee — just before boiling. For tea, the temperature depends on your particular varietal — white, green, oolong, black, herbal or rooibos teas. Black teas should be brewed just after boiling, while more delicate white and green teas should be brewed in temperatures below that of coffee (as low as 77C). In Pursuit of Tea has a basic brewing guide with temperatures for different teas, but you’ll want to defer to your tea dealer for the recommended time for your specific teas.
Timing: Depending on your method of brewing coffee, it takes about 3-6 minutes to brew. Steeping tea is pretty much the same — it depends on the type of tea you’re brewing. Some oolong teas should be brewed for seven minutes and can even be re-steeped, while more delicate teas like white teas will be brewed in as few as three minutes. Check the brew time for your specific tea; again, this basic brewing guide will get you started, but don’t be afraid to experiment.

Tools of the Tea Trade

You can use a French press or perhaps even an AeroPress to brew tea, but part of the pleasure of tea is the whole tea-making ritual. Consider investing in a nice teapot that reflects your sensibilities — English porcelain, Japanese cast iron, modern glass, etc — to upgrade your tea experience.
Besides a pot to steep the tea in and some method of straining the tea leaves (usually built into the teapot), you really don’t need much. A water kettle for boiling water, some means of timing the tea as it steeps (e.g. one of these top Windows timer applications), and the container are pretty much all you need.

Additional resources

There are a great many more types of teas, so your best bet is to explore. Here are some additional resources for exploring the world of tea:

• Types of tea and their tea benefits from WebMD
• The Republic of Tea’s Citizens’ Tea Library, with basic tea varietal information
• Adagio teas tea of the month club for discovering different types of teas as a monthly subscription

Have any other tea tips or resources? Share them with us in the comments.

New Products

Well its been some time since I last posted here, yes we all seem to get caught up in our busy lives but I thought Id take some time out of my Monday morning and show yall some cool and interactive things and products - something of which has been missing here a bit of late.
This first one is an interesting childrens play ground device. The video is a little repeatative yes but give it a go and just imagine how cool this would have been when you were growing up!



Invoxicated from PlayDesigner on Vimeo.

The Invoxicated interactive play sculpture is a bit like that, but a bit more complex, a lot cooler looking, and it actually works! Children can explore the playful qualities of sound by talking into one end of the sculpture to produce sound for the listener on the other end. By bending parts of the sculpture and pressing its various buttons, a multitude of sound effects can be achieved in real time.
Designer: Karl-Johan Ekeroth

________________

When I was in my 2nd year of study of industrial design, I was given the task to go and see an OT. An occupational therapist assit people with disabilities to overcome certain tasks which 'normal' dont give a second thought to. Have you ever thought how you might open a jar with only 1 hand. Many people in this world have to find ways to every day. One of the hardest places for the disabled to function self suffieciently is in the kitchen and with food preperation. This next product is a great effort to help people with these tasks

 

 

Designer: Grace Lim

___________

The last product Im going to show you today isnt so much a tangible thing but in todays world of design, we must be opening our minds to the fact that design is capable of thinking about and more importantly solving problems humans have without the tangible. The free time identifier is a solution to that social networking problem we ve had for years. "Im free and I want to connect with others in real life. Not on the web, but how do I know who else is free?"

Free-Time Identifies When You’re Not Busy, Shares Your Availability With Friends

By Adam Dachis from LifeHacker (See the side bar just over there... Subscribe, you ll learn all sorts of stuff)

iOS: Free-Time is an unusual but helpful app that takes a look at your iPhone’s calendar(s), figures out when you’re free, and lets you know how much free time you have open in the day. You can then share this information with friends for simple planning.
Free-Time works with any calendar you sync with your iPhone, whether that’s through iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Exchange, or any other supported service. When you start it up, it’ll teach you how to use it and you’ll enter a little information about your day so it knows when you’re generally busy even though your calendar shows that time is free. These are things like going to work and sleeping. Once you answer these questions, you’ll be presented with all the time you have available in the day. You can then apply filters to only show when you have time for certain activities, such as dinner or coffee. When you’ve selected a period of time you want to share, you can send it via SMS, email, copy and paste it wherever you want, or bump it to another device running Free-Time.
While the app seems a bit unusual at first, it’s a neat idea that’s executed well. When someone asks you if you’re free on a specific day for a specific purpose, you can use Free-Time to check.
Free-Time (Free) [iTunes App Store]

World Barista Championships

The World Barista Champs have just been on in Corferias, Colombia June 2-5, 2011. Australia was represented by Matt Perger. You can learn more about this guy in his interview for the competition

Australia Barista Champion 2011 Matt Perger from World Coffee Events on Vimeo.

Matt made the finals of the three world competition and you can watch the whole thing below as well as have a snoop around the webite here

Watch live streaming video from worldbaristachampionshiplive at livestream.com

You'll hear me posting a lot about coffee amoung other things here but the commentary in the video above is quite interesting about the barista vs the consumer taste preference battle, posing some interesting thoughts I felt.

And if you don'tlike coffee at least marvel at the spectical which are competition baristas, certainly a bit of wank to them, but at the end of the day thats why we love them.

Born to Learn

This is a eye opening little animation, well worth a look in my young opinion

Born to Learn from Born to Learn on Vimeo.

How Good Designers Think

How Good Designers Think

3:59 PM Tuesday April 26, 2011
by Simon Rucker  

We all know that really good designers somehow think differently from you and me about new products. But just exactly what does this difference consist of? The best summary of what makes really good designers tick was a simple post by Bruce Nussbaum back in 2007. Since reading that I've often pondered the subject and today, I find it helpful to look at my experience of how good designers think (and do) at each stage of the innovation process: insights, inspiration, and action.

Insight: They Look at What We
Don't Know
Most insight, because it relies so heavily on asking consumers, only deals with improvements to known/ existing products and services (I'd like it bigger, cheaper, quicker, smaller, etc). It rarely deals with the new/never been done before — the unexpected but relevant solution.

No one ever asked for Starbucks, or Walkmans or iPods, or the Internet, or texting — they were truly new ideas. And no amount of consumer research gave Steve Jobs the confidence to re-imagine the music industry.

Good designers aim to move beyond what you get from simply asking consumers what they need and want. First of all because they understand that most people when asked don't say what they mean or mean what they say, but also because people often don't know. Good designers want to unearth what consumers can't tell them: latent & emerging needs and motivations; actual behaviors and attitudes; and, crucially, barriers to as well as drivers of change — or simply put, what your competitors don't also already know.

How?

Firstly, good designers don't tend to think about consumers; they think about people and what they want and need. It's a subtle point, but thinking about people as consumers immediately dehumanizes them and makes it harder to empathize.

Secondly, good designers like observing — really looking at what people do rather than simply relying on what they say they do. As Paul Smith once explained, when asked where he got his ideas from: "You and I could walk down the street together and look at the same things, but I'd SEE ten times more than you would."

Thirdly, they bring expertise in other categories and industries to bear on problems in others. They pull together threads from different functions, disciplines, fields, and sectors, and integrate them into a new and (the dreaded word) "holistic" understanding.

Fourthly, good designers look at what might all change in the short, medium and long-term, by engaging with the best trends and forecasting intelligence. Unlike other crystal ball gazers they use this prescience to help them understand how they could bend the future, shape it to their vision.

And lastly, good designers pressure test their conclusions by consulting with other cultural 'interpreters' from a broad range of other disciplines.

Inspiration: They Look for What to Do
Good designers want to solve problems — and this makes them want to transform insights into inspiration.

How?

Firstly, they have the ability to visualize what has never been. As Bruce Nussbaum said in the same post, "Many firms are plagued by articulate and persuasive 'smart talkers' who sound good in meetings but get bogged down in abstract complexities." Good designers are good at what I call inspirational tangibility, "making it real," whether it be by concretizing with a sketch what would otherwise be abstract thoughts or so many post-its in a meeting, enabling large amounts of complex data to be understood and absorbed quickly with a diagram, or as Bruce describes it "quickly lashing together a physical or digital mock-up" of a proposed solution.

Secondly, good designers live and work in the future most days, immersed in the activity of actively creating and shaping their client's future visions of new products and services. And this familiarity with fusing creativity with what's feasible and commercial every day is what makes good designers so good at doing this consistently and better than others.

Thirdly, they overcome the "not invented here..." syndrome. For new ideas to survive and indeed thrive they have to be successfully embraced by all the relevant (another ghastly word) "stakeholders." Good designers can act as a translator between functional silos as different as supply chain, marketing and R&D.

Action: They Keep Going
When good designers talk about innovation, they mean (and I make no apologies for cribbing Lord Sainsbury's much-quoted definition), "the successful exploitation of new ideas." They don't stop with the invention. They turn their inspirations into reality.

How?

Firstly, in the case of a new product or service, it's unlikely to be successfully brought to market unless it can be integrated into and be supported by all the other aspects of the marketing mix: and if we're talking new business strategy, then good designers have to understand how the new offering could and should impact (and to what degree) all the other aspects of the organization: from its structure, to its mission and culture...all the way to the business model(s) that underpin everything.

Good designers don't claim to be able to do all these things, but they do know to work with the various functions and outside resources that do. And unlike some others, they don't leave their colleagues at the bus stop; they stay with the project until the end because nothing gives a good designer more satisfaction than being able to point to something that everyone else thinks is the best thing since sliced bread and saying, "I did that!"

Secondly, they are good at practical resolution. Bruce Nussbaum describes the problem thus, "Some of the smartest execs get bogged down in the messy process of implementation." But again, good designers' ability to "make it real" can help resolve contradictions and find highest common denominator compromises, helping the (innovation/ marketing) process more forward.

Thirdly, good designers are good at iterative prototyping, refining the concept through repeated cycles and getting feedback from the right people as they go. James Dyson famously made two thousand prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before he got it right. The rest, as they say, is history.

Simon Rucker is an associate director at global design and innovation company Seymourpowell, based in London.

More on: Creativity, Design, Innovation

Hurdling, the new planking

Ive just come across this latest trend, its called Hurdling. Its an adaption of planking - let me explain. In Australia we've been hit hard by this thing called "Planking". Essentially its a situation where a creative individual gets themself and a friend with a camera together to take a photo of them basically lying down in a funny place or circumstance. Heres what I mean:

So heres three different variations as far as I can tell that you can do with planking.
1. The artist plank
2. The improve plank
3. The planned/crazy /could hurt yourself plank

Even I've had a plank:

This is acutally a fourth type of plank.
4. The informative plank
I was using the medium of planking to show my friends on FB my new kitchen/the lights I installed and the railing you can see in the photo.

But Ive found a new type of trend. Its called "Hurdling"
This is the first add-on Ive seen to the planking trend where participants use their kinectic energy in the form posing themselves in a position where they are jumping over an object. Kinda funny stuff:

The main hurdler you can see in these is the founder of the hurdle, Bevan. You can join the Facebook group 'Hurdling' and be creative in the things you want to jump over...