Sugar and Tea
For the true tea connoisseur, adding sugar to tea is a heresy as it alters the liquor enormously.
The habit of adding sugar to tea didn't come from China. It appeared in the late 17th century in Britain and is thought to have originated as a way to combat the astringency of some of the green teas that were being imported. By the late 18th century, British tea drinkers were consuming 10 times more sugar then their european counterparts. Everywhere the British went to build their empire, the habit traveled with them i.e. America, Africa, Arabia (hence the quantities of sugar that Arabs put in their mint tea).
It is however a habit to unlearn if you truly want to enjoy the fabulous variety of aromas and flavours that tea has to offer.
If you're like me, you will have mornings where, coming down to breakfast like a zombie, the idea of having to choose and savour a fine tea can be daunting. You just want a simple quality tea that will wake you in a nice way while not giving you any guilt feelings for not paying particular attention to it. In others words, a cheap but reliable and tasty tea. Twinings sells boxes of leaf tea, one of which is called Vintage Darjeeling. This is a blend of Darjeeling teas of undetermined flush but it's predictable, it's good and it's cheap (compared to buying a first flush from some famous garden...). It's way better than lipton yellow label or the usual supermarket teas and it's great value for the price (+/- 10 € for 200 gr.)
Yixing (pronounced Yee-Shing) is a city in Jiangsu province in eastern China. It's very famous for it's reddish clay that has been used for centuries in teaware. It continues to be used today. The porous nature of the Yixing clay absorbs some of the tea aroma after each brew. Because of this, Yixing teapots are believed, over time, to enhance the flavor of the tea although to achieve this effect, one must always brew the same kind of tea in a specific teapot. This means that most people who use these teapots have several of them. For example, one for Ceylon, one for Darjeeling, one for Yunnan, one for Sencha etc... This tea enhancing property also explains their enduring popularity in China and now all over the world.
Sencha means common in Japanese. It's also their most common green tea. Which doesn't mean that it's not a good tea. The japanese are a very refined people when it comes to what they eat and drink. They take great care in buying (Sencha isn't cheap...), storing and brewing their tea. The local climate permits tea cultivation and tea has been a part of japanese culture at least since the ninth century when it was imported from China so most of Japan's production is consumed locally with little available for export. As such, Sencha, in our parts of the world, is something of a premium tea. 
