Combining the characters for “stand” and “meet,” “tachiai” is the term for the initial charge that gets all sumo bouts underway.

(Credit to John Gunning and The Japan Times for the paraphrased quote above.)

Hello there, my friends. Let’s talk tea… literally. No spilling!

Somewhere along the way, I went from coffee-drinkerism to tea-drinkerism, a conversion that started to brew five or so years ago when I experienced an odd occurrence of coffee-induced nausea during a bout of the common cold. It was a note-to-self moment, don’t drink coffee again until the cold’s run its course, and somehow, the moment never ended. It just so happened that I never got back around to drinking coffee. It was an incidental quitting rather than an intentional one.

Maybe it was because I wasn’t missing the daily jump-start into the morning that I didn’t make a special note of it.

I didn’t miss the coffee jump-start, but now that I’ve made a new morning ritual of matcha-mushroom tea – a concoction I started drinking in the third week of last October, so four months ago as of this writing – I’m enjoying a different kind of daily morning boost. A cup of matcha green tea has the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee, but its caffeine delivery is a mellow slow-release. Where coffee roars, matcha green tea purrs. It’s a sustained purr that carries on for hours and hours.

The energy I get from matcha is significant yet quiet as its wonderfully juxtaposed calming effect is the opposite of the coffee jitters I remember too well. I find the whole experience of drinking this magickal beverage in the morning to be incredibly soothing, and I get to work with just the right amount of energy. With matcha green tea in my system, I hum along rather than bounce off the walls. There’s no crash-and-burn.

Mixing medicinal mushroom powder into the tea simply carries it over into another realm of goodness.

At night, I’ll sometimes indulge in another tea beverage: A Bengal Spice (Celestial Seasonings) soy milk latte. Celestial Seasonings crafted their Bengal Spice tea to be a caffeine-free chai, so essentially it’s a chai latte that can be enjoyed at night. I steep the tea for 5-7 minutes, covered with a cloth (so the brew is deep and intense in color and aroma) before filling the remaining 1/4 of the mug with soy milk. Those are my chai tea latte proportions of preference: 3/4 tea, 1/4 soy milk.

On that note, my friends, I’ll wish you all a good night, this being later at night on my end. Translate this to “Good (whatever-applies-where-you-are).” Truth be told, writing about tea is making me want to get to bed earlier so that I can wake up sooner to my morning matcha-mushroom brew.

Until mid-week, then.