PRODUCT REVIEW: Planetary Design Airscape Canister

Don't bother reading to the end of the review. Go out and buy one immediately.

Still reading? I'll assume that you've already placed your order and are now reading to find out how awesome your canister is going to be when it arrives, because it is going to be awesome.

There are very few products out there that I would call a necessity for the average tea or coffee lover. The Airscape is a necessity. It will keep your tea and coffee fresh for as long as you need it to be fresh.

One of the biggest problems with both tea and coffee is getting it. You have to open the canister to retrieve the leaves or beans. Even if you use an air-tight canister, every time you open it, you are letting in new air. That air will, time after time, degrade your tea and coffee.

For most of us, this degradation is only apparent when we go from the last of the old stuff to a new package. The differences are so stark as to be detectable by even the most uncaring.

For me, the Airscape is a godsend because espresso amplifies the effects of aging beans. I am aware of it from day to day, even hour to hour.

In my old canister, my first couple of days of espresso shots were smooth, accurate, crema-filled cups of pure heaven. But after that, the shots failed increasingly frequently, the crema disappeared, and the rich chocolates and caramels went bye-bye. To compensate for this, I bought coffee in very small amounts — sometimes as little as an eighth of a pound.

The Airscape eliminates the need to do this. I can buy coffee in bulk, store the majority of it in another sealed container and keep my Airscape filled. The act of pressing the air out every time prevents the coffee beans from ever being exposed to new air for a long period of time.

The effects of this are so significant that I barely if at all have to alter my grind settings on my grinder as time passes. The ambient temperature and humidity levels become far more important for determining grind than the age of the beans. That is a revelation.

Tea is more sensitive to aging than coffee. My wife, a tea aficionado of the highest order, can taste the degradation of loose-leaf tea as time goes by. This canister eliminates that entirely. Your tea will always be fresh, punchy, and delicious. Once you determine your ideal steep temperature and time, you will never have to adjust that as the leaves age. You need this.

There are a number of other vacuum canisters out there, but none of them are as good as the Airscape's simple design. The Beanvac is impressive as it automatically sucks out all of the air surrounding the beans. The bad part is that it is battery-powered, thus requiring replacements, costs more, and doesn't do any better a job. There are also a number of other canisters that require you to manually pump the air out. None of these achieve the easy simplicity of merely pressing the cap down until it reaches the beans. It is not a pure vacuum, but it comes so close as to make no difference.

Buy the Airscape. You will not regret it.

Planetary Design Airscape: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

PRODUCT REVIEW: V8 Fusion With Green Tea

I love V8 Fusion, as does, apparently, the entire country. It's been a massive, runaway success for the company, selling tens of millions in product in its first year alone. It's proven to be big enough of a hit where Wal-Mart has even introduced its own Great Value version of the drink.

Capitalizing on this success, V8 continues to release new versions of Fusion and has now introduced an entirely new variant, a sort of double-fusion of Fusion and green tea. I was hyped and grabbed the bottle. I assumed that they just soaked a green tea bag in V8 fusion, but no. That would have been hoping too much, and it also gives me an idea to just do that myself.

V8 Fusion with tea is 50% juice and 50% tea, and the 50% that's tea has been sweetened with, ugh, sucralose. Why couldn't they have just used extra grape juice, or, sacrilege, sugar. Mercifully, the sucralose flavor is mild, here. No, the biggest problem is that the flavor is just so bland and mild compared to ordinary Fusion. That 50% that isn't juice is sorely missed. The flavor is hollow, you kinda' sorta' taste the green tea, and the sucralose makes itself known very quickly as the flavor leaves your palate. And, as with most sucralose-sweetened drinks, that flavor is the last one to leave your tongue after you stop drinking it.

Unlike drinks completely flavored with Splenda or aspartame, which means diet or diabetes, this is not zero calorie nor zero sugar. It has 10g of sugar and 50cal per serving. This is a drink that you drink because you want it, not because you're limited in your choices. As such, the use of sucralose is open to criticism. It makes it taste bad. Yes, yes, I know that not everyone can detect the difference; but I can, and so can most of my friends.

I initially puzzled, who is this drink for?! It's not diabetes or diet friendly, but it's flavor is negatively affected by the presence of sucralose. Why would they put sucralose in at all? Then it hit me. I'm coming at this drink from the wrong angle. It is not V8 Fusion. It is bottled, pre-sweetened green tea with juices added. This is for people who drink bottled Green Tea like crazy, because they think that it's somehow healthy, but want something that tastes, I dunno', good.

That is where my dislike is rooted; the bottle is branded incorrectly. If they had called this Lipton Green Tea with V8 Fusion added, I would never have even considered it, and I would have never been disappointed. As such, if you come at the bottle with this perspective, you won't be disappointed. In fact, you might be ecstatic to find bottled Lipton tea that doesn't taste like butthole. But I'm not reviewing Lipton, I'm reviewing V8 Fusion, and this concoction just isn't up to snuff.

V8 Fusion with Green Tea: NOT RECOMMENDED

First Cold of the... of the....

ACHOO!... Season.

I'm sick. I have that lovely scratchy feeling behind my nasal cavities and down my throat a bit. At least it doesn't feel like the spiky golf ball I had in my throat near the end of last flu season. That sucker required antibiotics.

Still, life will be tough for the next few days. When you have mild congestion and a sore throat, coffee tastes like butt. One of my great loves in life tastes terrible. Just imagine if your husband/wife looked and smelled like a donkey when you had a cold. Same thing. And yes, I just compared coffee to your loved one.

But I'm taking this time to partake in one of my lesser romances: tea. My partner loves tea. She's a tea fiend. She feels strongly about many parts of tea. For example, anyone who says you should add the milk to a cup before the tea is out of their mind. Just try and argue this with her. See what happens. So about two years ago, my girlie's love of tea was too much for me to take. Being male, I'm naturally competitive. I thought about just killing her and thus removing a rival, but instead opted to learn to love tea as much as her.

Tea is a great drink. It's light, low in caffeine (but still enough for a kick), and comes in a bewildering variety of flavors. Tea is truly a drink for kings. Now to begin my discussion of tea, I'll turn to a god amongst men, the first person to mix pop-culture geek and cooking: Alton Brown.





This episode is getting a bit long in the tooth, and since the creation of Food Network and the logarithmic growth of the internet and its offerings, the world of tea has grown well beyond what Alton knew about at the time. Local grocery stores offer super-wide selections of bagged tea, with many stores offering loose-leaf in multiple varieties and brands.

For me, the internet was my best friend. The number of tea reviews available makes learning about tea a one day endeavor, leaving you to only go out and experience. I quickly discovered my love of deep and powerful black teas. Russian Caravan and Scottish Breakfast became instant favorites. While tea flavors are not as versatile as coffee, they are so amazing varied. Also unlike coffee, one tea can taste completely different from another tea. They can go well with milk or not, iced or not, some red teas I've had have needed no sugar to be sweet. Coffee always tastes like coffee. Tea, seemingly, can taste like almost anything.

Tea Reviews

• Teaviews.com- The definitive source. I find them a bit forgiving of average teas, though.


• The Tea Review Blog


• Tea Amigos

My own experiences indicate that many store teas are great teas for the price. I've had no complaints with Twinings, but the world has changed a great deal, and unless you're worried about price, there's basically no reason to buy the cheap teas. Mighty Leaf bags give you some of the best tea in the world conveniently in little hand-sewn pouches, and brands like Revolution Tea give you better tea for not much more than the cheap brands. You can also save a little money and buy in bulk. You'll never get down to the levels of Twinings or Bigelow, but you'll do well.

My favorite "big" tea has definitely got to be Mighty Leaf. They are the best bagged tea available, and they're beginning to penetrate farther into supermarket shelves. The various common brands have a few winners amongst their ranks, like Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea, and you won't be disappointed, but they take up space from higher-end teas that could be made available.

If you're willing to order online, I highly recommend both Teavana and Mark T. Wendell. You'll get some of the very best teas from both places, but M.T.W. is local (for me, anyways), so it's best to support them. Teavana does have nearly one hundred locations nationwide, which allow you to walk in, sample teas, talk about each variety, and generally begin immersing yourself in the tea-drinking world. I've never had any problems with Teavana, but it's locations, clientele, and marketing are hard-core pretentious (namely, you're superior for drinking this tea), and they're pricey, even in the world of high-end tea. You can avoid this by ordering online, but then I prefer M.T.W. again.

The major players are also not the only ones in the game. Many, many smaller companies produce a whole rainbow of blends and varieties.

Others worth mentioning-

• Marie Belle


• Tea Guys


• TeaGschwendner


• Tea Leaves Try the Eros Aromatic Black Tea.


• Numi

A note on Numi. Their bagged teas aren't anything amazing, but they are quite pricey. It's their fantastic blossoming teas that make them truly worth it. Their loose-leaf is also very good, as one would expect, but I still prefer M.T.W.

And in closing, a bit of advice on sweetener. Lots of tea fanatics prefer as neutral a sweetener as possible, which usually means white sugar. I've found that more natural cane sugars can add some serious depth to black teas, and keeping a variety of honey around is a must for lighter teas. Hell, some teas are best drank as honey-water with a hint of tea. I find myself almost never using white sugar. Perhaps some of the finer details of the tea are lost, but I don't care. Beautifully layered experiences from tea as it slowly cools, from the tea itself and the quality of the milk, all the way to the sweetener. You can blend as many flavors as your tongue can distinguish. Don't be shy about dumping stuff into a cup. The myriad flavors of tea almost demand such experimentation. And the healthful benefits of tea means that you can basically drink it until you explode. Tea is a perfect drink. So do so.