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Each of these were things I could drink tea from.

This much, I knew, but I kept my mouth shut and just listened. I had a lot to learn.

“Clay cups are something that came from China,� Sasha said. “Clay is porous and can hold some of the flavor from tea, which can add to the flavor of later cups.�

She shook her head.

“But clay cups are a personal experience,� she added. “You wouldn’t want to share your clay cup with other people — or they wouldn’t want to share your cup.�

A little of you would also go in the cup.

We talked about how glass cups were good for tea, but naturally fragile; how ceramic mugs were pretty much the blue chip, gold standard for tea and coffee; but that old chinaware might be better to look at than to drink from.

Not all glazes are equal, and some of those old glazes could be toxic.

Drinking out of a metal cup is fine, if you don’t mind a slight metal aftertaste with your tea. Of course, if you’re drinking a strong black tea, you might not notice.

Black tea can taste a bit like iron.

There was more.

Sasha told me orange pekoe isn’t a flavor, which explained why it didn’t taste like orange at all. I’d just assumed I couldn’t pick out the orange notes, that I lacked the palate to fully enjoy it.

This would not surprise me. I’m a fan of loaded cheese fries.

“It’s a grade of tea,� Sasha explained.

In many parts of the world, orange pekoe signifies high quality tea made of whole, unbroken leaves.

Orange pekoe means something else in the United States.

Sasha tore open an American tea bag and poured a fine, black powder out onto a sheet of paper. This was garbage, apparently — not that I knew any different.

I’ve been a devoted coffee drinker for most of my life. I started young.

When I was a kid, my family used to visit my grandparents during the summer. My grandfather worked as senior custodian overseeing several schools in Flint, Michigan. Most weekday mornings, he’d get up hours before the sun rose and go check on different job sites.

There were no cell phones and no calling just to check in. My grandfather had to go out and make sure the work got done.

So, most mornings he’d head out to the schools, give out assignments and find out what had been accomplished previously. Later, he’d have to come back around again.

In the summers, when my sisters and I came to visit, he’d take a break about the time we were getting up to have breakfast with us. We’d find him sitting at the kitchen table, next to a box of Dunkin Donuts (a real delicacy for us, as we only ever got donuts from the grocery store), reading the newspaper and sipping a cup of black coffee.

In solidarity and admiration, I’d drink coffee with him, but loaded with plenty of milk and sugar.

By high school, I took it black like he did and like my father, though I gradually moved from instant crystals to brewing in a coffee maker. Later still, I got swept up in the vast changes in American coffee. I discovered espresso drinks, French presses and pour overs.

I never paid much attention to tea. When I was a kid, I’d drink iced tea at home if we didn’t have soda. We seldom had soda in the house, except for amazingly foul diet drinks, which had an off-putting chemical flavor.

So, when Mom brewed iced tea, I loaded it down with lots of sugar and lemon juice. It was basically brown lemonade.

Hot tea was always a novelty, something I drank when I was cutting back on coffee or if I had a cold or needed help sleeping. There were always teas in the grocery store promising to help you relax, help you get over the sniffles or make it easier to get to bed.

I didn’t know much about any of it, couldn’t tell if any of it worked, though I did learn the hard way to be wary of herbal teas — particularly burdock and dandelion tea.

Years ago, a hippy friend of mine gave me a batch of burdock and dandelion tree. This was during one of my many attempts to lose weight, quit smoking and get healthier. The tea, she said, would cleanse my system of toxins.

I should’ve asked what she meant by “cleanse my system of toxins.�

Two cups later, my weekend plans were set; going more than 15 paces from the bathroom was out of the question.

Coffee was just a better fit for me. Yes, a little too much could make me jittery, but I kind of like that, up until my eyelid begins twitching.

Still, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the seemingly endless variety of teas out there and the rituals that go with brewing and consuming the stuff.

Sure, there are coffee rituals, too, but those seem like more recent developments slapped together by people in secondhand cardigans who support fourth-party presidential candidates and think pottery classes should be free.

Back before Christmas, I wandered into Appalachian Tea while shopping for gifts. I’d never been in the place before because, as a coffee drinker, it never occurred to me that there would be anything I wanted.

But I liked the look of the shop, with all its tea-related paraphernalia, assortment of books and little nooks to sit. It was cozy and friendly.

Sasha seemed very knowledgeable and incredibly patient. The day I came in, she was trying to help a non-tea drinking customer figure out what to buy for a friend, whom she thought probably liked tea.

To listen to the customer explain what she wanted felt like hearing a blind woman trying to describe an elephant to someone who was deaf, but Sasha stayed with the woman as she eventually settled on an assortment of tea gadgets and some candy.

I felt like I’d found a good teacher to learn something about tea.