Thanks! My dream job is to be menu planner for a bed and breakfast, if in fact that were a real paying job. Since I've gotten into teas in the past couple years, now I can imagine that my menus would include tea pairings.
This might be a silly question or more detail than you feel like typing out, but I'd love to hear more about tea pairings if you feel like sharing. I drink tea with most of my breakfasts, but I normally just buy some teas that I like and drink whatever I'm in the mood for that morning along with whatever food I'm eating. The decision about which tea to drink is completely separate from the decision about which food to eat. What kinds of things do you look for when you pair tea and food? This conversation makes me think of wine pairings, but I don't drink alcohol, and if I did I would probably manage it the same way as I currently manage tea (pick food and wine separately, consume them together with no thought about how well they go together), so any analogy to wine pairings is probably going to be lost on me.
Fun question! This might be too idiosyncratic for my opinions to actually work for anyone else, but I like thinking about it. (No analogies to wine pairings here--I only barely tolerate wine.) Another disclaimer: I only know about herbal teas and flavored teas. I don't know about, say, all the different kinds of black tea that allegedly have subtly different properties.
Anyway, I guess what I'm looking for is a tea that has some similarity to the food but not too much. If the food involves fruit, maybe I'd have a fruity tea but one flavored with a different fruit. With a sweet food, I'd pick a tea that's somewhat sweet but also somewhat bitter, and I'd be less likely to add sugar to the tea lest the meal become cloyingly sweet. The history or national origin also affects my perception. I like Earl Grey with pastries--seems very British. I like green tea with Asian food, even though I otherwise don't usually drink green tea.
