Teadrinker here! Love me a good cuppa. Or just Lipton’s. They say Lipton’s is “floor sweepings,” but it’s tasty enough. Also, I can’t afford the good stuff all the time.
When I do indulge, I get loose-leaf Darjeeling, and love it. Yums! No cream, no lemon, one packet of artificial sweetener. One cup at a time, boil in the microwave.
I use – and recommend – a “snap mesh tea ball infuser.” I also keep a little shot-glass on my desk, to put the ball infuser into so it doesn’t drip on my desk-top.
Also fond of Japanese Green Tea, especially Jasmine Tea. That’s for dessert!
I too got told to cut down on coffee - so I cut it out. But being a Brit, I was already drinking tea.
Different people like teas at different strengths. I like my tea fairly strong (‘stiff’) but my brother likes his almost homeopathically weak.
I like English Breakfast, Assam, Ceylon, Lapsang Souchon, Darjeeling, and Earl Grey (but beware those with too much bergamot). Yorkshire Tea is my current everyday tea. I mostly drink tea with milk and sugar (I’m trying to cut down on the sugar). I’m not a fan of green tea, but it has its place and I drink it neat.
My mother likes fruit teas. Not my cuppa, really.
Don’t be afraid of teabags; one of their advantages is that you can remove the teabag when you’ve got the right strength. Do be aware that the initial brown colouration is often caramel so you need to wait a bit. Equally, some teas don’t gain a strong colouration at the strength I like (e.g. Darjeeling). Avoid the likes of PG Tips, Typhoo, and Liptons (especially) unless desperate. I believe PG Tips and Liptons are both owned by Unilever. Good names to start with are Twinings and Jacksons.
There’s even an English-grown tea, Tregothnan Estate, but I’ve yet to taste it, and I’ve read that it’s not really English, but Assam with added English.
I use a glass teapot with infuser I was given. The infuser makes things much tidier, and again, you can remove the infuser to prevent the brew getting too strong.
I love iced tea in the summertime, preferably with lime, lemon, or mint (and golden sugar). Solar tea is best for this, since it has a much smoother flavor (if I can say that) than tea made with boiling water. I also use an infuser to control the strength of the final product.
Fill a big jar with fresh cold water. Lower your infuser into the water and cover the jar. Leave out in the sun until it’s the color you’re looking for and remove the infuser. Chill and enjoy over ice.
If you want really sweet tea, boil some sugar syrup to mix with the iced stuff.
Fruit and herbal teas can also be drunk cold and are quite good that way!
You don’t actually even need the sun. Just put the business in the fridge, and, with time, the tea seeps/steeps, and you get “Moon tea.” Also, it’s already cold!
Calling Red Rose “swill” is exactly the kind of attitude I heard from another experienced tea drinker. I don’t doubt you and I don’t object in the least.
But I sure would love to get enough experience so that my palatte could distinguish between good tea and “swill”. I used to love coffee and I feel the need to improve the taste of the tea I’m drinking.
Can anyone recommend any specific kinds of teas that go well with honey or with lemon or maybe with both? I have drunk tea both with honey and with lemon and I appreciate the taste of both. I just have no idea whether a breakfast tea would be better with honey or lemon or both. Same goes for a dark tea.
I drink lot of tea 5 cups a day during the week, more on weekends. Mostly I drink slightly green oolong because it’s easy to drink in almost any situation. It fits the same slot in my mind that mid day coffee used to, but I can drink about 5x as much without getting over caffienated. I make myself a cup when I feel like I want a mid day snack but don’t want to mindlessly eat. I drink that neat and resuse the leaves 4ot 5 times. In the morning I usually have a cup or two of black tea with skim milk and sweetener. Right now it’s the Adagio Irish Breakfast blend, but that change with my mood. I like Barry’s Gold tea bags a lot too. I also enjoy Rooibos as a warm bed time drink in the winter with a good bit of milk and honey.
Weirdly I got into tea by posting a question here about why bits always say you can’t get a good cup of tea in America. The answer I got was that essentially it was a attitude problem with the US toward tea so even if we did it right we got the spirit wrong, but mostly we didn’t do it right either. Years later I am probably still doing it wrong but with (I think) the right spirit.
I like Darjeeling teas with honey and lemon quite a bit. You could maybe skip the honey but I think the lemon really adds something.
There are a lot of them. I would recommend going to adagio and ordering a sampler to see what (if any) you like. Good bang for your buck introduction to the style.
I don’t use either (I like unrefined sugar, AKA Sugar in the Raw) but honey probably goes better with a lighter tea like Darjeeling or Rooibos (which is technically not a tea but a tisane). “Afternoon” teas are usually a blend of lighter teas. Most green teas are lighter as well. Lemon might go better with stronger teas like Assam, Ceylon, Keemun, or breakfast teas.
Be careful, though; being a tea snob is a terrible burden.
It is very annoying to go to a nice restaurant where coffee drinkers get a bottomless cup of high quality coffee while tea drinkers get a single tepid cup of Lipton tea for the same price. It’s nice to go to Canada once in a while to see the situation reversed.
I should add that if/when you get into higher quality teas you might try them without lemon. Lemon is normally added to lesser tea to hide some of the bitter taste and it could overpower a better tea. However, if you still find you like lemon go for it!
My daily tea has shifted from Yorkshire to Typhoo in the last two weeks because my local store was out of Yorkshire. I keep some Punjana Irish Breakfast around and a big box of Barry’s Estate tea.
The Wife usually enjoys a decaf green tea or something with a fruity scent, but she drinks many more cups during the day than I.
You know what, I totally get that. I would never order tea in a restaurant around where I live. Sometimes when I go back home to visit Los Angeles there are places that can make you a good cup of tea but it’s typically Asian tea, which is totally fine, but not what I would be ordering if I had the option most of the time (and LA has an almost fetishistic fascination with White Tea which I really don’t understand. It tastes like nothing!) and is presented with a very “look how fancy we are” sort of flair. My guess is that you probably feel about tea the way I feel about Mexican food. It’s not that it’s actually impossible to get done well, but even when it’s right it’s somehow off because it isn’t just a normal part of the daily backdrop of life.
Another fan of loose tea and a diffuser here. I have a diffuser spoon that I take to work, where I brew one cup of tea at a time, and a larger tea ball diffuser that I use at home when I brew a pot. My gateway tea was Earl Grey and I still enjoy it. The scent is delightful and is half the experience. Bergamot is such a great complement to black tea. I also enjoy Assam, Darjeeling, Irish Breakfast, English Breakfast and Ceylon, which has a lovely reddish color that looks beautiful in a fine china cup. (As any true tea drinker will tell you, tea drinking is an ‘experience’, and involves a ritual. One develops one’s ritual as one goes along). I don’t put anything in tea unless I’m ill, in which case I’ll put a dollop of honey in to help a sore throat.
I also endorse those who recommend getting a sampler of different types of teas. You will be surprised at how different each one is from the other and there will doubtlessly be one or two that really speak to you.
And please, back away from the tea bags. They really do put lesser quality tea in the bags. Good, loose tea will resemble a pile of tiny twigs. Tea in tea bags is generally a powder. Not the same experience at all.
I drink at least 2 quarts a day. I really like tea. I use tea bags. I prefer Celestial Seasonings brand. Right now I am drinking their “Nutcracker Sweet.”
I do have proper tea things (ceramic pot, strainer, loose tea) but I am usually in such a hurry to have my first pot I do not make the time to do it properly.
I never used to drink tea. I started a few years back, thanks to the influence of my running partner, who grew up in Dublin.
I prefer strong black teas, like Irish Breakfast or English Breakfast; I can usually get a good deal on a box of Barry’s (an Irish brand) in the imported foods section of the local grocery store. Yeah, it’s bagged, not loose, but it’s still much better than Lipton. I have it with a splash of milk, no sugar.
If you want to buy loose tea, I recommend Simpson and Vail
They tend to have a fair price for very high quality tea.
Currently, my favorite is Yunnan. I’m drinking Imperial Yunnan from S&V at home, and a discontinued Yunnan that Peats used to sell at work. I also love Gunpowder Green. Sometimes, on weekends, I like to curl up with a smoky Lapsang Suchang, which reminds me of my father. I also have some Roibos (not technically tea) to drink in the afternoon when I don’t want caffeine, some Darjeeling, some Oolong, and a few others.
I usually drink my tea with nothing added. No milk, no sweetener, no lemon. So I can’t help you there.
I use a little tea pot with a custom fitted strainer at home, and a thermos with a mesh tea ball at work. Both work well.
