Best Teas for Lattes

Uji, in the hills south of Kyoto. In the sixteenth century, at the request of tea masters such as Sen no Rikyū, growers roofed their fields with screens woven from the reeds of Ogura Pond, and the bushes are still covered two to three weeks before picking. The shaded leaf is steamed and dried without rolling into tencha, then ground on a stone mill. Matcha is whisked rather than steeped, the only thing on this shelf that never meets a strainer. Thick tea, koicha, is shared from one bowl; thin tea, usucha, is a bowl each.

The chai pan is the other tradition, and cardamom is what makes it smell like itself. The Cardamom Hills of Idukki, in Kerala, are named for the crop, and Travancore ran the trade as a royal monopoly, soldiers posted against smugglers, until 1896. In 1914 a German planter, Oscar Majus Kloeffer, set Kerala cardamom into his coffee estate at Cobán in Guatemala, on communal Maya land taken under President Justo Rufino Barrios and worked by Q'eqchi' families bound to the estates. Guatemala is now the leading exporter, most of it sold to the Gulf.

Cocoa and coffee arrive at the same counter. Cacao was domesticated at least 5,300 years ago in equatorial South America and reached Mesoamerica around 3,800 years ago; the Olmec and the Maya drank it along the Yucatán more than three thousand years back, and Moctezuma II is reported to have taken no drink but chocolate. Theobroma means food of the gods. Coffee's first coffeehouse opened in Istanbul in 1555, at Tahtakale.

Brew any of it at double strength, because the milk halves everything. Masala Chai is the pan itself and Coconut Chai Latte the softer version of it. Matcha, Organic is the whisk. Cream of Earl Grey under steamed milk is the London Fog, and French Vanilla Mocha, Organic is for somebody who came in wanting a mocha.