Question of the Day: Coffee or Tea?

I call our generation (within my family) the non-coffee generation. I don't drink it, my sister doesn't (or didn't; she recently took to drinking flavored coffees after receiving an espresso machine) and the cousins that I know (I have lots of cousins I don't know) don't drink it. It's a little odd, because all of our parents are regular coffee drinkers.

I may be the only one, however, of this generation who is a regular tea drinker. I'm not fancy about it, I just buy and use tea bags, but it's always been my hot drink of choice when I have a, well, a hot drink. I don't drink a great deal of herbal "tea", but do have a variety of flavored teas, a recent favorite being Bigelow's oranges and sweet spice, which is black tea with, yeah, you guessed it, oranges and spice.

I don't often add anything to my tea, but sometimes, when I do, I'll add some honey. The only person I know, besides myself, who drinks tea a lot is my dad, and though he always drinks coffee in the morning, when it's later in the day, he has tea, sometimes more than one cup. I don't know how healthy his tea habit is, since he must have a donut or something similar with his tea. I like to have something with my tea too, usually candy, but since I've moved away from consuming a lot of sweets, I'll most often have just a little dark chocolate with my tea. That habit started with my Afghan ex-girlfriend, who was also not a coffee drinker, but consumed a lot of green tea. She made it strong, and I liked it, and began drinking green tea almost exclusively for a while. She also turned me on to dark chocolate, which is the only kind she liked, and I owe her for that, because, you know, it's so healthy and all and I'll live forever due to my massive consumption of dark chocolate (I rarely eat milk chocolate these days).




So, some people seem to be coffee drinkers, and some tea drinkers. This is illustrated in the introduction to Isaac Asimov's science essay collection Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright, where he says that his wife, Janet, tolerantly prepares his coffee, because she drinks tea. I also tolerate coffee drinkers, as there are lot of them at work, and they make and drink the dreadful stuff from the coffee maker in the break room. Thank the Lord there is also always a large box of black tea bags on the shelf in there as well. The free tea has made a few converts, who inevitably only seem to prefer tea as the day drags on, perhaps assuming coffee is a morning drink, while tea should be confined to the afternoon and evening.

That makes some people drinkers of both coffee and tea, I guess. But surely even those crazies still prefer one over the other. How about you. What is it to be today, coffee or tea?