By Magdalena Witkowska

Caffeine, that magical element in coffee that shakes you up and wakes you up, is present in an even greater amount in a sister beverage known as tea.

We are all busy and a lot of us are overloaded with work. Managing a family and at the same time juggling a packed schedule can prove to be a daunting task. Under such circumstances, a dose of freshly brewed coffee or tea is the best thing that keeps people going.

Coffee and tea can be consumed in different ways in different seasons. During the winter and cooler months, when we wish that everything liquid could pass over our tongues and down our throats, should be warm or perhaps scaling hot. Brewing becomes an affair involving steaming cups of coffee and tea being served with wild abandon, not just for the freshness of the drink, but also for the warmth they provide by the additional caffeine supplied energy. Come summer and the recipe changes. Coffee goes into the blender instead of the coffee pot, where it is joined by ice cubes and other ingredients to make a cool shake. Tea manages to escape the violence of the blender and gently seeps away into ice water.

While previously, both coffee and tea were available in the state that they were grown. There is a choice available today, in the sense, that you can purchase either of them as caffeine free (decaffeinated) products.

Caffeine is good, but for people with sensitive sleep cycles it can be a bit of a bother. There can be a craving for coffee and tea at odd times (like just before going to sleep) and a cup that is not decaffeinated can keep these people awake for a long time. By choosing the decaffeinated option, they can enjoy their coffee and tea more casually.

What remains a constant mystery is that downers made out of alcohol are such great party makers, while the brain sharpens and activity enduring caffeine laced beverages like coffee and tea are more associated with comfort.

Most people will usually stick to either coffee or tea as their caffeine beverage of choice. This distinction can get pretty difficult when you consider that there are plenty of people who will drink coffee at certain times and switch to tea at other times, all within a single day.

There are even some places and cultures where the beverage is chosen, not on the basis of the time of the day, but on the gender of the drinker. When you are over there, you will notice that tea is decidedly a ladies’ drink (much like gin and tonic) while coffee is bit more like cigars and usually men indulge in it.

However, like everything the beverage culture is also undergoing a change and today the choice of beverage is solely dependent on personal preference.