Lapsang Souchong

Autumn's just about here. The nights are getting cooler and longer, and until I fire up the pellet stove for the season, the house gets a little chilly at night. Chilly enough for a good cup of tea, y'know?

So I brew a big mug of Lapsang Souchong. It's a unique variety of black tea: the leaves are dried over pine fires, which impart an unusual smoky taste to the tea. It's not a "culinary" smoke flavor, like hickory-smoked bacon or applewood-smoked pork. No...it's a"true" smoke. A "wild" smoke. The smoke of a lightning-kindled brush fire, or a latenight campfire.

When I was a kid and October came around, the whole family would work outside on cold clear Sunday afternoons, raking and piling leaves. The days were sunny and the skies were cloudless and bright blue, and we could see our breath as the wide bamboo rakes pulled oak leaves across the yard to the burn pile out by the toolshed. Late in the afternoon, we'd light the leaves and burn the piles down to ash. The fire was warm on our faces and the smoke stung our eyes when the wind shifted. We'd watch the fire and smell the smoke and we were tired from raking leaves and piling branches all day, but we knew there was beef stew with dumplings waiting in the kitchen and besides, the smoke smelled great.

October skies and leaf fires. That was where my very first mug of Lapsang Souchong took me. The aroma and taste of the tea is almost a perfect simulation of that long-ago autumn air.

And that's not the only memory that Lapsang nudges awake. Some of the best times of my life have been wrapped in fire and smoke. Clambakes on the beach cooked over driftwood fires. Half-drunken marathon Monopoly games in front of the fireplace at my best friend's house back in the '70s. Poking at a bright campfire while my three-year-old daughter sings herself to sleep in the tent behind me. Thawing out beside the fire, winter camping during hunting season in Vermont.

Yeah. That's one damn amazing cup of tea.