A chamomile blend by Tealyra called “Tranquil Nights”

I would say that there is not much of a “culture” around green tea specifically, as there tends to be a much stronger culture of black tea, at least where I am on the east coast (Hot black tea in the Northeast/New England, iced/sweetened black tea in the Southeast).

As others have stated, most Americans would be familiar with it in teabags or bottled green tea, and so many who do end up trying it don’t enjoy it because they end up trying a bitter, lesser-quality version of it. Others may be familiar with it in Japanese or Chinese restaurants, where the quality is hopefully better, but this probably cannot be rightly called American green tea culture.

In my experience, it is the sort of thing where the green teabags might be the only ones left in an office meeting room because, while someone thought to stock the meeting room with green tea in the first place, all the others have been used up first and then someone has forgotten to refill them.

Daily Arch user here. The process of configuring an Arch install is perhaps not as difficult or mystical as you are imagining. I would say it is more like your first analogy: picking what off-the-shelf parts you want for a system and then putting them into a case. I think what you are describing is more like Linux from Scratch.

Installing Arch is effectively taking the steps performed by the installer .iso disks which every distro uses and instead doing it manually with CLI commands. You use CLI commands to partition the drive, create a filesystem, install a basic set of packages, then chroot into your system and use the package manager to install the rest of the packages you want. Aside from editing a couple config files, there is zero coding involved. The exact steps vary from guide to guide, but a basic outline of what I do is as follows:

• First, I download the Arch iso and write it to a USB.

• Once I boot up the install USB, I use iwctl to connect to my wifi for the packages I will need to download,

• then I use fdisk to partition the drive I want to install to with an EFI and linux filesystem partition (You might also make a swap partition at this step but I typically use a swap file on my filesystem partition).

• then you use mkfs to create filesystems on the EFI and linux filesystem partitions.

• Then I use genfstab to make the /etc/fstab file

• Then, I use pacstrap to install the base packages like pacman. Then I mount the filesystem and chroot into the new partition.

• From there, I basically use pacman to install all the packages I need, including the linux kernel (I use linux-zen), the DE (I use KDE), the boot manager (I use Refind), and everything else. There are a few cleanup steps like setting the locales and time zones, etc. but that is about it.

I suggest watching a guide on youtube, which was how I learned, or installing something like Arcolinux or Endeavour, which simplifies the installer into a series of checkboxes to select what DE you want, etc.

I would say that looseleaf green tea would be a big step up from teabags. A strainer basket that goes in a mug is a very low-fuss way to make looseleaf tea, as they are easy to clean and reusable. Looseleaf Japanese sencha was a game-changer for what I thought green tea could be.

I am personally not a huge fan of the mesh balls as tea tends to escape out from the gap along the middle, and for green tea especially, too much particulate can be bitter.

I also have a teapot with a strainer which functions much the same way, but for when I want to brew more than one cup.