Say tea and Iâ??ll think black. So ingrained is my prejudice that I forget the vast majority of the world drinks green tea. Which is why a message on Adagioâ??s TeaChat forum took me aback yesterday. Posted by a green tea lover, it asked for suggestions to move into black tea. And I suddenly realized it never occurred to me anyone could ask this question. It just goes to show just how much my palate is influenced by my culture and place of origin.

Anyhow, it was fun to turn my prejudice on its head and start thinkingâ??if I had only drunk green and wanted to move into black, what would I have? My answer, like many other posters suggested in that thread, was to choose oolong. Oolong is a somewhat neglected teaâ??Joe Simrany of Tea USA once told me that it is only drunk by 2 percent of the worldâ??s tea drinking populationâ??which I think is a shame. Most oolongs make fabulous drinking. The one I am drinking now, Whittardâ??s Formosa Imperial Phoenix Oolong, is lovely, with light but round mouthfeel and a delicately sweet flavor. Oh, and I read somewhere that it helps fight aging.

But whatâ??s perhaps more interesting for someone wanting to move into black tea is that oolongs come in several degrees of oxidation. This means you can slowly adjust your green-geared tastebuds by going from a very lightly oxidized oneâ??closer to green teaâ??to a highly oxidized oneâ??closer to black. Indeed, some of the more highly oxidized oolongs were developed specifically for the export market to satisfy black-tea-shaped Western palates like mine.

The concept obviously works just as well in the reverseâ??you can drink oolong as a way to move from black to green. So did I follow my own advice and drink it when I made my first forays in the world of greens? Nope. Soft landings are not for meâ??I belong to the sink or swim school. I jumped straight into Gunpowder (the green tea, rather than the explosive type). And you know what, it worked for me because it suddenly opened my eyes to a whole new gamut of tastes that I wanted to explore. Maybe I should have suggested to that green tea lover at TeaChat to take the plunge and start drinking Irish Breakfast.