Apple & Pear Green Tea

Previous complaints about the horrors of green tea solicited a box of Twinings’ Apple & Pear Green Tea from a kindly church member. The sales patter goes:

China and England have each done their bit to make tea famous; inspiring us to create a blend where East meets West. We've taken two English favourites; crisp apple and sweet pear flavours, are blended together with green tea to create a light tasting, golden Chinese green tea. Each cup will take you from an autumn orchard to the tea gardens of Zhejiang province in just one sip.

The pear and apple flavours certainly help to mask the revolting taste of the green. One wonders why Twinings does not simply dispense with the latter and just make apple & pear tea (rudimentary research reveals that it does that anyway). We often mix things in our tea, primarily milk and sugar, to add to, or to hide, the existing flavours. One friend cannot abide tea with anything less than three sugars. With that level of sweetness, one cannot really regard it as tea, but a nice hot cup of steaming diabetes.

Be careful what churches add to the gospel to make it more amenable, palatable, fashionable, acceptable. A glass of water with a pinch of salt is barely drinkable; a jug of ale with a dose of poison is lethal; a cup of green tea with apple and pear is not unpleasurable: a gospel blended with error is spiritual feeblesness at best and spiritual death at worst. Shame on those who dilute God's sweetness while artifically sweetening His judgements.