A nice cup of tea
"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea." - Sydney Smith
George Orwell, scourge of the right and of the wrong-headed left alike, fought the forces of repression with well-written essays, polemics and books. And even with actual guns bullets in Catalonia. Like most humans, he was brilliant but also terrible and occasionally shockingly bad. He had firm opinions about tea: the title of this post is a nod to an essay of his setting these out. I lack his eloquence, and his political heft, but I also like tea a lot.
I'm still working out what to do in the light of recent events. What's the British thing to do when in turmoil? Make a nice cup of tea. So, in lieu of offering anything more constructive by way of dealing with the current political situation, here are my ideas about what makes for good tea.
The aim here is to get the most satisfying and consoling cuppa. Fundamentally, what that means is down to individual taste and tradition. But if we leave it there we miss out on a fun conversation, so here's my view.
The Turks and Irish may drink more tea than we British per head (the Turks substantially so), and the Indian subcontinent might go to greater lengths proportionately to get a brew, but we are still in the top league of tea-drinking nations, and it is a fundamental part of British culture. It is evidently a tradition in decline, but to be honest that's very much in line with Britain generally, which given what most British traditions were like is broadly a good thing. As well as being the result of a deeply problematic imperialist history, the whole business of British tea-drinking is run through with class considerations, often unexamined, which is awful, but at least tea is drunk still drunk by people from all classes, and good thing too.
There are many, many lovely teas and infusions, and I enjoy many of them myself. But proper tea, ur-tea, the most tea-like and satisfying tea, is black tea. And an English breakfast blend at that. I like it full-bodied and rich, so heavy on the Assam, but with some lighter fragrant notes to balance. You can go for a pure single-estate Assam, or fine delicate Darjeeling (which I do from time to time), but the danger there is you can end up having a gustatory experience rather than a good honest cuppa.
As a materialist atheist, I'm a great believer in the power of ritual and ceremony. So while brewing up with a teabag in a mug is the overwhelming majority of the tea I drink, proper, serious tea requires the whole ritual and ceremony of a pot, loose tea, and china cups. I'm convinced this makes for better tea in the sense of being nicer-tasting, but even if a blind tasting convinced me otherwise, it still makes for better tea in the sense of being more like tea ought to be.
The mechanics matter. I don't have golden rules like Orwell, but I do have a number of key principles to keep in mind.
Principle 1: Oxygen in the water.
The water needs to be freshly drawn. That means reboiling the kettle is wrong. Those boilers that sit on office kitchen walls, boiling away merrily for hours, are a disaster in this respect. And I've scalded myself on those far more often than I have on ordinary kettles, so I'm unconvinced they're a health and safety improvement. Although I suppose there is the fail-safe that if you start to scald yourself and jerk away, the flow stops, whereas it's possible to spill the contents of a boiling kettle all over your most delicate bits, so maybe in the tails it's safer.
Anyway. Most of the time you are using a kettle, not one of those horrors.
Pour out anything that's left in the kettle, run the cold tap for a bit till it runs cold, then fill the kettle with as much water as you'll need and very little more. This is partly ceremonial and ritualistic, and historical about contamination, but is also about the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Not overfilling the kettle is polite and correct on multiple grounds. Chiefly, it uses less electricity, and boiling water in kettles is one of the most electrically-intensive things people do in their houses these days. Some have argued that boiling a whole kettle means anyone coming after you to use the kettle won't have to wait so long. But only if they reboil it, which means they'll have a less-good cuppa. It's not right to inflict that on anyone.
Principle 2: Boiling water on the tea.
The water needs to be really, really hot - like 95 C or so - when it hits the tea. If you're using green tea or Oolong or something you want it cooler, but black tea needs to be brewed pretty much at boiling point. I believe this to be backed up by all sorts of studies about extracting different flavour compounds from black tea. It's certainly backed up by tradition and word-of-mouth expertise as it has come to me, and my own non-systematic experience. It really doesn't take much to cool boiling water substantially below 100 C, so you need to take care.
This is why you want to warm the pot, or warm the mug. You can get away with not doing this, but it makes an inferior brew - a cold vessel will cool the water down from near-boiling surprisingly fast and surprisingly far. And it's only a matter of a few extra seconds to warm it first. My favourite strategy is to divert some of the water from the kettle when it's hot but not yet boiling. I do sometimes end up reboiling the kettle a bit this way, which is not ideal. If I'm doing it properly, I boil a little bit of heating water first (which can legitimately be reboiled from warm water left in the kettle), then boil the brewing water with fresh cold water.
You also, obviously, want the kettle right next to the mug or pot, so you can pour it in while it is still at a good rolling boil.
If it's come off the boil before you pour it on, it's better to bring it back to the boil than to pour it in when it's cool. This is in tension with the 'no reboiling' rule, of course, which is why you need to get everything ready and pay full attention to the job so you're not left in the awful situation of choosing between options (use not-boiling water, reboil, start from scratch) which are all less than optimal.
A fast-boiling kettle is well worth it. The difference between a 1.7 kW kettle and a 1.4 kW kettle is noticeable, and if you drink tea more than occasionally you really want a full-on 3 kW job. Once you have one you won't look back. It is not coincidental that these can be had for about a pony in just about any shop in Britain that sells anything with a plug on it, but are like hen's teeth just about anywhere else in the world. In North America, they're more-or-less impossible to make, too - at UK/European 230 V, 3 kW draws 13 A, which is up the top end of what you'd want to draw from a ring main but on the right side of the line (and in the UK the supply is generally 240 V, which drops the current well below the danger zone); but on American 110 V systems, 3 kW needs 27 A, which is more than you can draw from most outlets safely.
Principle 3: Brew for long enough, and no longer.
A quick brew can be great when you need it, but some things are better not hurried. I always remember steer observing, in response to the Windows 95 slogan 'everything you do will now be faster and better', that some things do not get better if you do them faster. Brewing tea is one of them, and sex is another.
You can get a strong-enough brew by using more tea for a shorter time, but there are particularly nice flavours that only come out after steeping for a good few minutes. This is something lots of people get wrong a lot of the time - including me. I've recently taken to setting a timer, which has dramatically improved my results. It also prevents the even worse disaster of brewing up, popping off to do something while it steeps, and then forgetting about the tea until too late. This is very bad because you don't want to leave the tea in for too long, or it gets stewed and bitter. Or even forget it entirely! 'Too long' here is something like over 10 or 15 minutes. I reckon 4 minutes is where you're aiming.
Ideally, you want to insulate the brewing vessel (mug or pot) while it's infusing, to keep it as close to proper brewing temperature as possible. With a pot, a tea cosy is just the job, but a mug cosy is probably too fiddly for everyday use.
Once it's brewed, you really need to take the tea leaves out of the water. This is easy with a teabag in a mug, but harder with a traditional setup of loose leaves in a pot. The second cup out of a pot with loose tea in is often way too stewed, and watering it down mitigates the problem slightly but doesn't fix it.
Principle 4: Don't scald the milk.
Some people put milk in their mug before the hot water goes on. This is hopelessly wrong. For one thing, it cools the water so it can't possibly be hot enough to infuse correctly. For another, the fat in the milk extracts flavours from the tea leaves that are not nice. And for yet another, adding boiling water to milk makes it really horrible - more on this in a moment. The people who brew tea like this, of course, disagree and actually like those flavours. Well, people who brew tea like this deserve what they get is all I can say.
To be clear, this is not the milk-or-tea-first dilemma as I understand it. Brewing with the milk in is just wrong.
The milk-or-tea-first dilemma occurs if you're correctly brewing in a pot and deciding whether to pour milk or tea in to the cups first. I am not a hardliner either way on this one, so long as the milk isn't heated too much (scalding it). People of good tea faith can come to different views on this one, I say. I do lean milk-first, though.
There's one idea that says that milk-first should be avoided out of fear that you might be perceived as being concerned that your inferior china won't stand up to the heat of the tea on its own. I strongly suspect this of being silly middle-class prissiness. The sort of person who would care whether I was trying to conceal the low quality of my teacups is not the sort of person I want to care about giving a good impression to. And this is a completely bogus concern now - tea cups these days can totally stand boiling water.
Very hot water on milk denatures the proteins in it, making it taste like UHT milk, which is horrible. Generally this steers you towards milk-first: the milk is slowly brought up to the final temperature of the final brew. If you do it tea-first, the first part of the milk will get substantially hotter than the final temperature of milk-and-tea, risking scalding it. But other solutions are possible. If you can get the leaves out of the tea once it's brewed, you can let the tea cool down to near drinking temperature without it stewing, and then add milk second fairly safely.
If you want to do tea-first from a pot of loose tea (and can't get the leaves out easily), you can pour the tea out and then wait a little until it's cooled enough not to scald the milk before you add it.
As a final practical point in favour of milk-first, you get a better mix more quickly that way than with
do tea-first. Tea-first almost always requires stirring with a teaspoon, but with milk-first you can often get away without.
If you're brewing in a mug, you're pretty much stuck with pouring the milk in to the tea rather than the other way round. I like to swirl the tea as the milk goes in and to do it quickly, to try to minimise the overheating effect. I keep forgetting that it would be a better plan to let the tea cool to near drinking temperature first, and then add the milk.
Once the milk is in, the tea will cool less quickly. Partly this is straight-up physics: the rate of heat loss is directly proportional to the temperature differential, so a hot cup will lose heat faster than one that's merely warm, so leaving it to cool for 5 minutes then adding the milk will cool it more than adding the milk then leaving it to cool for 5 minutes. But apparently there's also a substantial surface effect from the milk fat, which reduces evaporative cooling. So it's smart in multiple ways to do most of the cooling before you put the milk in.
Principle 5: Break any of these rules sooner than doing anything outright barbarous.
This is George Orwell's final rule of good writing, repurposed for tea making. He declined to be so open-minded about his tea. I have read and admired his writing; I have never had the chance to drink his tea, and I doubt it'd be as much to my taste. Also, I think the word 'barbarous' runs the risk of doing some questionable neo-colonial work here that I'm not entirely happy with. But the broad principle applies.
I'm a tea pragmatist. Fundamentally, tea is for consolation, reassurance, and fortification, and whatever works, works. If you can't do the full tea ceremony at some particular point, or can't be bothered with it, you can make better tea by picking off as many elements of the full monty as are compatible with the exigencies of your current situation. So, for instance, tea leaves in an infuser in your mug is a bit better than a teabag, and a thin porcelain mug is better than a chunky stoneware one.
There's a balance to be struck. In times of serious emotional crisis, in a situation where there will be sobbing, I would almost always go for a mug and the swiftest possible brew. And even, in extremis, a spoon or two of sugar. (Sugar can go in whenever you like, but it dissolves more easily if you put it in when the water is hotter.) But if maintaining composure is important, stiff upper lip style, the full performance might be a better plan.
One final whine: the way certain Continentals and North Americans serve tea is the antithesis of good tea and breaks pretty much all my principles: overboiled water is brought to you at drinking temperature, with a teabag on the side, and a tiny packet of UHT ready-scalded milk. There is no route to a decent cuppa from there, and frankly you're better off drinking something they do know how to make.
One of the things I love about Britain is that this almost never happens anywhere you get tea. You can get a decent cuppa just about anywhere in Blighty, and jolly good show.
Edit: I have been alerted to the existence of the two-pots method. You brew in a pot as normal until the tea is at the correct strength. Then you pour it in to a second warmed pot, straining as you go. With a cosy on the pot, you can linger over a huge pot of tea for ages without it getting stewed (which happens if you leave the leaves in) or undrinkably cold (which happens if you pour it out in to cups). This seems like a great solution for a situation where you have two ordinary pots rather than one of those fancy ones with a strainer insert for removing the leaves when it's brewed. It also reminds me of the two-hats cure for colds.*
* Take a hat and a bottle of whisky to bed. Put the hat at the bottom of the bed and drink the whisky until there are two hats. IME this provides good short-term relief, and once your hangover is gone, so is the cold.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/325576.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
George Orwell, scourge of the right and of the wrong-headed left alike, fought the forces of repression with well-written essays, polemics and books. And even with actual guns bullets in Catalonia. Like most humans, he was brilliant but also terrible and occasionally shockingly bad. He had firm opinions about tea: the title of this post is a nod to an essay of his setting these out. I lack his eloquence, and his political heft, but I also like tea a lot.
I'm still working out what to do in the light of recent events. What's the British thing to do when in turmoil? Make a nice cup of tea. So, in lieu of offering anything more constructive by way of dealing with the current political situation, here are my ideas about what makes for good tea.
The aim here is to get the most satisfying and consoling cuppa. Fundamentally, what that means is down to individual taste and tradition. But if we leave it there we miss out on a fun conversation, so here's my view.
The Turks and Irish may drink more tea than we British per head (the Turks substantially so), and the Indian subcontinent might go to greater lengths proportionately to get a brew, but we are still in the top league of tea-drinking nations, and it is a fundamental part of British culture. It is evidently a tradition in decline, but to be honest that's very much in line with Britain generally, which given what most British traditions were like is broadly a good thing. As well as being the result of a deeply problematic imperialist history, the whole business of British tea-drinking is run through with class considerations, often unexamined, which is awful, but at least tea is drunk still drunk by people from all classes, and good thing too.
There are many, many lovely teas and infusions, and I enjoy many of them myself. But proper tea, ur-tea, the most tea-like and satisfying tea, is black tea. And an English breakfast blend at that. I like it full-bodied and rich, so heavy on the Assam, but with some lighter fragrant notes to balance. You can go for a pure single-estate Assam, or fine delicate Darjeeling (which I do from time to time), but the danger there is you can end up having a gustatory experience rather than a good honest cuppa.
As a materialist atheist, I'm a great believer in the power of ritual and ceremony. So while brewing up with a teabag in a mug is the overwhelming majority of the tea I drink, proper, serious tea requires the whole ritual and ceremony of a pot, loose tea, and china cups. I'm convinced this makes for better tea in the sense of being nicer-tasting, but even if a blind tasting convinced me otherwise, it still makes for better tea in the sense of being more like tea ought to be.
The mechanics matter. I don't have golden rules like Orwell, but I do have a number of key principles to keep in mind.
Principle 1: Oxygen in the water.
The water needs to be freshly drawn. That means reboiling the kettle is wrong. Those boilers that sit on office kitchen walls, boiling away merrily for hours, are a disaster in this respect. And I've scalded myself on those far more often than I have on ordinary kettles, so I'm unconvinced they're a health and safety improvement. Although I suppose there is the fail-safe that if you start to scald yourself and jerk away, the flow stops, whereas it's possible to spill the contents of a boiling kettle all over your most delicate bits, so maybe in the tails it's safer.
Anyway. Most of the time you are using a kettle, not one of those horrors.
Pour out anything that's left in the kettle, run the cold tap for a bit till it runs cold, then fill the kettle with as much water as you'll need and very little more. This is partly ceremonial and ritualistic, and historical about contamination, but is also about the amount of oxygen dissolved in the water. Not overfilling the kettle is polite and correct on multiple grounds. Chiefly, it uses less electricity, and boiling water in kettles is one of the most electrically-intensive things people do in their houses these days. Some have argued that boiling a whole kettle means anyone coming after you to use the kettle won't have to wait so long. But only if they reboil it, which means they'll have a less-good cuppa. It's not right to inflict that on anyone.
Principle 2: Boiling water on the tea.
The water needs to be really, really hot - like 95 C or so - when it hits the tea. If you're using green tea or Oolong or something you want it cooler, but black tea needs to be brewed pretty much at boiling point. I believe this to be backed up by all sorts of studies about extracting different flavour compounds from black tea. It's certainly backed up by tradition and word-of-mouth expertise as it has come to me, and my own non-systematic experience. It really doesn't take much to cool boiling water substantially below 100 C, so you need to take care.
This is why you want to warm the pot, or warm the mug. You can get away with not doing this, but it makes an inferior brew - a cold vessel will cool the water down from near-boiling surprisingly fast and surprisingly far. And it's only a matter of a few extra seconds to warm it first. My favourite strategy is to divert some of the water from the kettle when it's hot but not yet boiling. I do sometimes end up reboiling the kettle a bit this way, which is not ideal. If I'm doing it properly, I boil a little bit of heating water first (which can legitimately be reboiled from warm water left in the kettle), then boil the brewing water with fresh cold water.
You also, obviously, want the kettle right next to the mug or pot, so you can pour it in while it is still at a good rolling boil.
If it's come off the boil before you pour it on, it's better to bring it back to the boil than to pour it in when it's cool. This is in tension with the 'no reboiling' rule, of course, which is why you need to get everything ready and pay full attention to the job so you're not left in the awful situation of choosing between options (use not-boiling water, reboil, start from scratch) which are all less than optimal.
A fast-boiling kettle is well worth it. The difference between a 1.7 kW kettle and a 1.4 kW kettle is noticeable, and if you drink tea more than occasionally you really want a full-on 3 kW job. Once you have one you won't look back. It is not coincidental that these can be had for about a pony in just about any shop in Britain that sells anything with a plug on it, but are like hen's teeth just about anywhere else in the world. In North America, they're more-or-less impossible to make, too - at UK/European 230 V, 3 kW draws 13 A, which is up the top end of what you'd want to draw from a ring main but on the right side of the line (and in the UK the supply is generally 240 V, which drops the current well below the danger zone); but on American 110 V systems, 3 kW needs 27 A, which is more than you can draw from most outlets safely.
Principle 3: Brew for long enough, and no longer.
A quick brew can be great when you need it, but some things are better not hurried. I always remember steer observing, in response to the Windows 95 slogan 'everything you do will now be faster and better', that some things do not get better if you do them faster. Brewing tea is one of them, and sex is another.
You can get a strong-enough brew by using more tea for a shorter time, but there are particularly nice flavours that only come out after steeping for a good few minutes. This is something lots of people get wrong a lot of the time - including me. I've recently taken to setting a timer, which has dramatically improved my results. It also prevents the even worse disaster of brewing up, popping off to do something while it steeps, and then forgetting about the tea until too late. This is very bad because you don't want to leave the tea in for too long, or it gets stewed and bitter. Or even forget it entirely! 'Too long' here is something like over 10 or 15 minutes. I reckon 4 minutes is where you're aiming.
Ideally, you want to insulate the brewing vessel (mug or pot) while it's infusing, to keep it as close to proper brewing temperature as possible. With a pot, a tea cosy is just the job, but a mug cosy is probably too fiddly for everyday use.
Once it's brewed, you really need to take the tea leaves out of the water. This is easy with a teabag in a mug, but harder with a traditional setup of loose leaves in a pot. The second cup out of a pot with loose tea in is often way too stewed, and watering it down mitigates the problem slightly but doesn't fix it.
Principle 4: Don't scald the milk.
Some people put milk in their mug before the hot water goes on. This is hopelessly wrong. For one thing, it cools the water so it can't possibly be hot enough to infuse correctly. For another, the fat in the milk extracts flavours from the tea leaves that are not nice. And for yet another, adding boiling water to milk makes it really horrible - more on this in a moment. The people who brew tea like this, of course, disagree and actually like those flavours. Well, people who brew tea like this deserve what they get is all I can say.
To be clear, this is not the milk-or-tea-first dilemma as I understand it. Brewing with the milk in is just wrong.
The milk-or-tea-first dilemma occurs if you're correctly brewing in a pot and deciding whether to pour milk or tea in to the cups first. I am not a hardliner either way on this one, so long as the milk isn't heated too much (scalding it). People of good tea faith can come to different views on this one, I say. I do lean milk-first, though.
There's one idea that says that milk-first should be avoided out of fear that you might be perceived as being concerned that your inferior china won't stand up to the heat of the tea on its own. I strongly suspect this of being silly middle-class prissiness. The sort of person who would care whether I was trying to conceal the low quality of my teacups is not the sort of person I want to care about giving a good impression to. And this is a completely bogus concern now - tea cups these days can totally stand boiling water.
Very hot water on milk denatures the proteins in it, making it taste like UHT milk, which is horrible. Generally this steers you towards milk-first: the milk is slowly brought up to the final temperature of the final brew. If you do it tea-first, the first part of the milk will get substantially hotter than the final temperature of milk-and-tea, risking scalding it. But other solutions are possible. If you can get the leaves out of the tea once it's brewed, you can let the tea cool down to near drinking temperature without it stewing, and then add milk second fairly safely.
If you want to do tea-first from a pot of loose tea (and can't get the leaves out easily), you can pour the tea out and then wait a little until it's cooled enough not to scald the milk before you add it.
As a final practical point in favour of milk-first, you get a better mix more quickly that way than with
do tea-first. Tea-first almost always requires stirring with a teaspoon, but with milk-first you can often get away without.
If you're brewing in a mug, you're pretty much stuck with pouring the milk in to the tea rather than the other way round. I like to swirl the tea as the milk goes in and to do it quickly, to try to minimise the overheating effect. I keep forgetting that it would be a better plan to let the tea cool to near drinking temperature first, and then add the milk.
Once the milk is in, the tea will cool less quickly. Partly this is straight-up physics: the rate of heat loss is directly proportional to the temperature differential, so a hot cup will lose heat faster than one that's merely warm, so leaving it to cool for 5 minutes then adding the milk will cool it more than adding the milk then leaving it to cool for 5 minutes. But apparently there's also a substantial surface effect from the milk fat, which reduces evaporative cooling. So it's smart in multiple ways to do most of the cooling before you put the milk in.
Principle 5: Break any of these rules sooner than doing anything outright barbarous.
This is George Orwell's final rule of good writing, repurposed for tea making. He declined to be so open-minded about his tea. I have read and admired his writing; I have never had the chance to drink his tea, and I doubt it'd be as much to my taste. Also, I think the word 'barbarous' runs the risk of doing some questionable neo-colonial work here that I'm not entirely happy with. But the broad principle applies.
I'm a tea pragmatist. Fundamentally, tea is for consolation, reassurance, and fortification, and whatever works, works. If you can't do the full tea ceremony at some particular point, or can't be bothered with it, you can make better tea by picking off as many elements of the full monty as are compatible with the exigencies of your current situation. So, for instance, tea leaves in an infuser in your mug is a bit better than a teabag, and a thin porcelain mug is better than a chunky stoneware one.
There's a balance to be struck. In times of serious emotional crisis, in a situation where there will be sobbing, I would almost always go for a mug and the swiftest possible brew. And even, in extremis, a spoon or two of sugar. (Sugar can go in whenever you like, but it dissolves more easily if you put it in when the water is hotter.) But if maintaining composure is important, stiff upper lip style, the full performance might be a better plan.
One final whine: the way certain Continentals and North Americans serve tea is the antithesis of good tea and breaks pretty much all my principles: overboiled water is brought to you at drinking temperature, with a teabag on the side, and a tiny packet of UHT ready-scalded milk. There is no route to a decent cuppa from there, and frankly you're better off drinking something they do know how to make.
One of the things I love about Britain is that this almost never happens anywhere you get tea. You can get a decent cuppa just about anywhere in Blighty, and jolly good show.
Edit: I have been alerted to the existence of the two-pots method. You brew in a pot as normal until the tea is at the correct strength. Then you pour it in to a second warmed pot, straining as you go. With a cosy on the pot, you can linger over a huge pot of tea for ages without it getting stewed (which happens if you leave the leaves in) or undrinkably cold (which happens if you pour it out in to cups). This seems like a great solution for a situation where you have two ordinary pots rather than one of those fancy ones with a strainer insert for removing the leaves when it's brewed. It also reminds me of the two-hats cure for colds.*
* Take a hat and a bottle of whisky to bed. Put the hat at the bottom of the bed and drink the whisky until there are two hats. IME this provides good short-term relief, and once your hangover is gone, so is the cold.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/325576.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.