Wood’s Tea

Welcome. To get this rolling like gun­pow­der pearl, and to pro­vide some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for our title—likely the last two tea ref­er­ences we’ll see for quite some time—I want to men­tion that I authored the char­ter for rec.food.drink.tea. That was in 1994. Back in those days the web was just get­ting off the ground and the best source of infor­ma­tion for any number of topics was Usenet News. Before the RFD (Request for Dis­cus­sion, the first step in cre­at­ing a news­group) went out for rec.food.drink.tea, a tea enthu­si­ast had to go to rec.food.drink and cull through posts mostly about coffee and alco­hol. I wanted a tea-​specific news­group, and I wanted it to be about tea as I expe­ri­enced it—meaning, par­tic­u­larly, dis­cus­sion about greens and oolongs and reds and blacks, about tea as in the species Camel­lia Sinen­sis. I wanted to avoid a lot of cruft and spam about herbal reme­dies. So, I made the tagline “Tea as bev­er­age and cul­ture” and sub­mit­ted the RFD with guide­lines I hoped would steer it in the right direc­tion. Note that my old email address from the RFD, rwood@sparta.r07lab.epa.gov, went to a spe­cific machine, the work­sta­tion named sparta I used when I worked at the EPA.

Just look­ing at rec.food.drink.tea now on Google I see that it’s fairly full of spam, but at least not about herbal teas. Alas, for the days when being an Inter­net user implied having a cer­tain ethic and intelligence.