TeaChat

Anyone have any recipes for Tea and booze that work well together? Especially any containing Gin or Grand Marnier which are two of my favorites. One i really like is Twinings Ultra Spice Chai Tea and instead of adding milk i add almond cream liquor or Irish cream, great for a lazy Saturday evening on the porch.

Anything super fruity goes well with Malibu/coconut rum(personally don't like sweet stuff but it goes well together ask the same) or a run of the mill Darjeeling with whiskey or spiced rum .
That's all I got.

Queen Victoria liked rum and Indian tea. I'm on a Chinese medicinal wine kick and have been doing a lot of reading on various TCM herbs and their properties. Liu'An with luohanguo jiu would be an excellent tipple to keep colds and the flu away, especially with the addition of some longan and maybe even some aglaia odorata flowers.

As for gin, I'd try longjing, and I'd think Grand Marnier would go well with oolongs or even a plainer heicha like liu an or liu bao..

Medicinal wine o.o????
This exists?
i used to just drank a few beers with the mucinex during my first years of college.

Yes, Chinese medicinal wine has a long history of use. The alcohol is just a potent carrier for the ingredients since alcohol is such an efficient solvent, although it has properties of its own.

Chinese medicine is really fascinating, especially since Western medicine is still catching up and learning that traditional medicine practitioners have known of the properties of plant and animal extracts for over a thousand years in some cases.

i musssst do a little research on this - too cool.

oh boy, the long confusing road of tcm

I can't help myself. It's fascinating.

What im getting out of this is that chinese medicine will either cure you or get you drunk. Either way you wont care at the end of the day.

jayinhk wrote:I can't help myself. It's fascinating.

Absolutely! I'm slowly trying to wrap my head around some of it too

I find this a reliable database for figuring out what the common names for the plants are, prepping the plant material correctly though for use...that can get complicated and take a lifetime for certain ones if you want to do it the traditional ways

http://libproject.hkbu.edu.hk/was40/sea ... 20Drugs%27

A key point that keeps popping up in my readings, use balanced combos of ingredients, not just one thing, be very wary of self medication and sources for the herbs (tcm plant market can get very sketchy)

Jay your so lucky you live in hong kong, it shouldn't be too hard to find a healthy old timer in one of those older shops that obviously knows a thing or two

Tomasini: Medicinal wine is one part of a complete holistic system of life and health that blows me away every day. Alcohol is considered a toxin in TCM, so it is used sparingly and you only drink a shot or two at most at a time.

Chinese medicine/tai chi/kung fu are incredible.

Teaisme: Nice link, thank you! Yes, I even made friends with the Chinese med guys across the street. I buy dit dar jow (fall hit wine, used by kung fu practitioners for conditioning) there and the next time I'm sick I may give their medicine a try. I also know of one around five minutes away that really helped me when I had terrible bronchitis. He helped me kick it in three days when antibiotics would've taken five and messed up my system!

As for self medication, there's nothing wrong with it if you really know what you're doing. I just bought a book on Chinese medicinal wines that I can't wait to read through, but TCM is definitely a vast world!

Oh I was being entirely facetious. I have no doubt that it's used sparingly andis most certainly way more complex than I know.