Sugar is the Pandora’s box of tea. So tempting, yet so volatile. In the history of consumption, the rise of the sugar and tea trades happened at similar times, and had a symbiotic relationship. Sugarcane from the West Indies was harvested at the same time Indian and Chinese tea plantations harvested their crops. Let’s face it, tea is good with sugar. Yet sugar, whether in the form of honey, sugar crystals, or Agave nectar, has the potential to hide the most exquisite elements of the tea’s flavor when all you can taste is the syrupy sweetness. However, with the right amount, it can also enrich the body of the tea.

A tea is comprised of three main components: aroma, texture, and taste. Let’s take Jasmine Green Tea. When you first smell it, it smells like jasmine flowers of course, but there’s also a deeper, woodsy smell lying underneath. Then you taste it. The texture is smooth yet sharp with the pungency of the jasmine flower. The taste is sweetly floral, along with elements of cut grass and lemon.

Conduct an experiment, and try to describe the aroma, texture, and taste of the same type of tea with and without sugar. See for yourself what tastes the purest to you. I’ll leave you with an excerpt written by the staunch anti-sugar man, George Orwell. The following is from his essay “A Nice Cup of Tea,” from the Evening Standard published in 1946.

“Lastly, tea—unless one is drinking it in the Russian style—should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.”

One image of summer that has always perplexed me is the people who sit around sipping boiling cups of tea on an equally sweltering summer day. From Nana, or mint tea, in Israel, Turkish coffee, to spicy Chai in India, the locals always seem to pair their humid climates with hot drinks. Is it because these tea drinkers are engaging in an extreme sports game of tea or is their a deeper, more scientific reason for this oddity? After doing some digging, I discovered that one reason is because the heat from a hot drink promotes your body’s metabolism, which means that it allows you to oxidize fat at a higher rate. It also will decrease your chances of becoming dehydrated because a hot liquid replenishes the body even more than cold water. This is because the body does not have to work as hard to digest it. Think of it this way- if you eat a popsicle, your body is not used to that type of coldness. The popsicle actually shock your system, making your body exert more energy, therefore creating more heat, in order to metabolize it. In Ayurvedic medicine, warm liquids are prescribed in order to balance the kapha and vata doshas. Western medicine backs this up, with the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently recommending that people avoid very cold drinks as it can provoke stomach cramps. Make sure to pay attention to how your body reacts to cold.

After asking some native Middle-Easterners, some told me that they always believed that hot tea increases your body’s temperature internally, therefore tricking your mind to believe it’s cooler than it actually is outside. Others claimed it’s because the heat makes you drink the tea slower, allowing for more time to sit around and wile away the day with friends. Whatever it is, hot tea is a comforting accessory to have on a summer afternoon.