Tea Tasting Sessions.

I grew up with a mum who loved to start her day sipping on a teabag in scalding hot water with white milk. It's also how she liked to end it. I made it for her often and became skilled at getting it just to her liking: hot hot, strong, and with just the right amount of milk.

Dad was a coffee drinker, so in typically rebellious style, that made me want to drink neither. I became the only twenty-something I knew who drank neither tea nor coffee.

Then, in my late twenties, I went to Yixing Xuan Teahouse in Singapore and, I'm not entirely sure why, booked myself into a tea tasting experience.

I was captivated from the first sip.

The ceremony. The delicacy. The health benefits. The taste. It all felt otherworldly to me. And given I'm a person who finds it hard to sit still, it also felt somewhat meditative to sit there drinking tea from tiny cups, slowly, over time.

The tea I drank there that day, and one I would still say is in my top five favourite teas, was a white tea. But this wasn't my mum's black tea bag in a mug with milk. It was the most delicate Baihao Yinzhen, a white tea. And no, don't get me started on how many different types of tea can be made from one plant.

From that day on, I started drinking tea.

Not the tea I'd grown up watching my mum drink. I started with the more delicate flavours of white tea, then moved onto green tea, white tea's big sister, who often gets a bad rap because people don't prepare her properly and she ends up tasting bitter.

Now, nearly twenty years later, my typical day might include white, green, black, oolong, pu-erh or herbal teas, depending on my need, mood and tasting preference. In the tea world, I get around, you could say. My kids even sell their own custom-blended herbal teas.

I've visited tea plantations in China, Japan, Taiwan and Sri Lanka. I've done tea tastings in more countries than I can count on both hands. Put simply, I adore tea. The history of it, the preparation, its roots, and what it can do for you.

I also love sharing that knowledge.

I'm the weirdo who shows up to a girlfriend's house for the weekend and brings five canisters of loose-leaf tea so we can conduct a tasting and discover exactly what she likes. For the record, she loved pu-erh, a fermented tea.