[Quiet Man Cometh]

Maybe not. I find coffee levels me out too. I started getting caffeine headaches in college when I averaged 5 cups of STRONG black tea a day. I tend to forget about my tea if I'm not watching it, though my stomche seems to have lost some of it's iron lining so I try to avoid oversteeping these days.

I've never really thought of blending my own tea. The most I do is mix an herbal tea I have with Yerba Mate when I drink it, because straigth Yerba makes me a little quesey. One of my favourite teas is actually a blend make by the wife of the man who runs a teashop at a botanical garden not far from here. It's a mixture of black teas with Lapsang Suchong (may have spelt that wrong) among other things, so it's nicely smokey but without over doing it. My gradnfather, apparently, used to live on the smokey Chinese teas.

Heh. I used to work at a Tim Hortons (Canadian coffe shop chain and cultural icon for people who don't know ;)) and a small video on coffee was part of the training. Apparenlty there are only two base coffee beans, Robusta and Arabica. Arabica would be your actual coffee beans, and Robusta would be your augmented grow-in-colder-weather-where-coffee-doesnt-normaly-grow coffee beans. They apparenlty make up a lot of the supermarket instant coffee stuff.

Not a coffee drinker except on rare occasions (I've had one cup since Christmas) but the history of it is fascinating. :). Watched a relatively recent documentary on the topic.