You often hear British people complaining how hard it is to find a proper cup of tea here in the U.S. I always thought it was pretty much–put tea bag in cup–add hot water, but obviously it’s more mysterious than that. How can I make a cup of tea that a Brit. might find satisfactory.
I don’t know how the British do it, but this is how I make my tea:
- Put hot water into a tea pot and put on the lid.
- Put cold water into the kettle.
- Bring the kettle to the boil.
- Dump the hot water out of the tea pot.
- Add one teaspoon of loose tea per cup, plus ‘one for the pot’.
- Pour the boiling water into the pot and put on the lid.
- Allow to steep three to five minutes.
I let the leaves sink to the bottom. Sometimes I’ll strain them out as I pour. I use milk and sugar in most teas. Green tea and Earl Grey I drink without milk or sugar.
Oh, my god.
Put hot water in a cup?
Dearie, there’s where your problem starts.
Hold on, kettle’s boiling. (No lie! First thing I do when I get home–and get up–is make a pot of tea.)
The water must be boiling. Not “hot”, boiling.
What is the point of making it in a cup? Make it in a proper teapot. NO glass or metal.
The teapot must be “hotted” first, with hot water (I use some from the kettle as it works its merry way to ‘boil’) swished around to get out the stale dregs and warm it nicely.
Tea. Good quality tea. I like Orange Pekoe myself, but others may disagree. To make a proper cup of tea, use loose, fresh tea leaves.
Steep sufficiently. (I like about 12 minutes, but I like my tea strong.)
Enjoy!
(I am a barbarian, and I put milk in my mug, then add the tea.)
Well, now, you begin by not using a tea bag at all. You use loose tea, and an infuser, and a pot. You start with nice, fresh water – not reheated – and just when it starts to boil, you pour a little into the pot to warm it up. Once the pot is warm, you put in the infuser and pour the boiling water over the leaves. Let it steep to your taste, and voila. The other thing the British do just to annoy the hell out of the French is to put their milk in first – so milk in the cup, then the tea on top of it. The other important thing is to use fresh tea. So buy from a merchant with good turnover (and here comes the completely unsolicited plug for uptontea.com), and use the tea within a reasonable span of time. These are just the rudiments, of course, but with them you’re well on your way to becoming the terror of your coffee-drinking friends.
I say three to five minutes. In reality, I’m usually reading The Straight Dope and I drink it when I drink it. Three minutes minimum (depending on the tea) for the first cup. Subsequent cups steep for however long it takes me to drink the preceding cups. 
No, no! The tea must be free to roam about the pot, and to sink to the bottom!
Here’s an authoritative account:
A Nice Cup Of Tea byt George Orwell
Boiling water from any old metal kettle. Kettle need to be at least 1/2 full after pouring.
Put Lipton[Sup]TM[/Sup] bag in the cup (dunk it up and down a few times to the “flow-thru” action going) and put the hot kettle on top of the cup. Let wait for 10 minutes or so.
Remove bag & give it good squeeze so no tasty tannins are left unextracted. Add 1/2 packet of Splenda[Sup]TM[/Sup] & approx 1/2 to 3/4 of one teaspoon of Coffeemate[Sup]TM[/sup].
Ahhhhh…
I’m here to fourth or fifth heating the pot (or cup, if you insist) first. I also pre-heat my teacup, too. I like to take my time with the tea and it’s no good if the cup is cooling it down too quickly.
But, I have to take issue with the boiling water.
The optimal water temperature for black teas is below boiling. Boiling water burns the tea, and evaporates the oils in such teas as Earl Grey. More info here and numerous other places.
Don’t get me started. Oh, too late:
Firstly, use nice tea. Anything that comes in a bag is floor-sweepings grade. The best quality black tea is whole leaf, broken leaves the next best, and so on down to the cheapest dust in the cheapest teabags, which may be of poor taste quality but are exceedingly good at giving an antique finish when a wet teabag is wiped over new pine wood. There are many, many sub-grades of tea, and the best is very expensive. Very good tea can be had at a reasonable price.
Here’s the Fridgemagnet recipe for a decent cup of tea:
- Warm a teapot with boiling water.
- Empty the kettle of old water, and fill with freshly drawn water, preferably filtered.
- When the kettle is boiled, empty the teapot warming-water, and add 1 teaspoon of tea for every cup + 1 for the pot.
- Pour the boiling water over the leaves in the teapot, and leave to brew for between 2 to 6 minutes, depending on tea variety and personal taste.
- Pour it out into cups before it stews and the tannins make it bitter. A good quality tea will be less inclined to stew.
- Add a little milk and/or sugar to taste. Lighter teas taste best without either.
If you must make tea with teabags, here’s how:
Put a teabag in an empty mug, pour boiling water over it, poke it around gently with a spoon for no longer than 20 seconds, and then fish out the teabag. Add slightly more milk and sugar than you would with leaf tea.
For more teabaggery, I refer you to the Tea Council, information goldmine for all things steeped and leafy.
The British Standards Institute won an Ig Noble Prize For Literature in 1999 for “BS 6008:1980 (ISO 3103-1980) - Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests”, or how to make a cup of tea. Though I feel, that at 6 minutes, the BS cuppa would be a little stewed.
Geez I’m an idiot, linking to a cite that refutes what I’m saying :smack: but have seen it mentioned many other places, I know I have.
I never dump rolling-boil water on my tea.
Why do you hate Amer… Great Britain?
By the way, does anyone out there use a tea cozy? Because that completely freaks me out.
No, seriously dude. Putting tea leaves in a diffuser is pretty much the same as putting them in a bag. It’s better to give the leaves space so as to get the most out of them.
Incidentally, I’ll drink bagged tea. I make it the same way as loose tea. But a proper pot of tea uses loose tea.
Let me take you back to 1982. I had just started on my computing career, doing data entry and some processing at Edwards Air Force Base.
I got to work earlier than the rest of the team. The rest of the team but one. Sometimes she’d beat me in. We had three coffee pots, two coffee makers, and a warmer. The first thing I’d do in the morning upon getting to the office would be to make one pot of coffee and one pot of hot water. I had to have my tea, dammit! This irked ‘GZ’ to no end. She would become livid if there weren’t two pots of coffee going when she came in. (She’d make two pots if she beat me in.) I tried to explain to her that putting two pots of coffee on would not make one pot or the other finish faster. Making one pot of hot water for my tea had no effect on her coffee whatsoever. And of course I’d make a pot of coffee as soon as the water was heated, so there would not be a coffee shortage. But she would not or could not understand. Somehow, in her mind, my making tea water slowed down her coffee. Since she was being illogical, I continued doing what I was doing.
One morning I was at my desk waiting the allotted time for the water to heat. ‘God damn it!’ shrieked GZ, ‘Who the hell put on a pot of water?’ I walked over and told her I did. In a quiet voice meant only for me she said, ‘If you put on a pot of water one more time I’ll see that you are removed. Permanently.’ She and I had separate meetings with our supervisor. The outcome was this: When annual raise time came round, I got one and she didn’t.
But if you leave the tea in the pot, then the tea keeps getting stronger and stronger – particularly after you’ve poured out the first cup of water. Also you get flecks of leaf in your cup. The diffuser is conceptually the same as a tea bag, but the difference is you are getting better-quality, and usually fresher, loose tea. Chacun à son goût, though. Like you, I drink a certain amount of cheap tea in bags.
Oh dear. Yes, you put a foot wrong the minute you said “tea bag”. And steeping it in the cup…oh dear.
But as that’s been addressed…you have to put the milk in AFTER you stir in the sugar. Otherwise it “bruises” the milk. Or something. Anyway my Brit says he can taste the difference…I’m not sure I believe him but I’m far too afraid of him to question 
.
The problem with teabags is not the bag per se, it’s the quality of the tea used. An opaque bags hides a lot of sins, such as sweepings (tea powder) from the bottom of the tea chest.
NO TEABAGGING! (Ref: Pecker)
I put the milk in first. Orwell, in the link above, disagrees saying that one can judge the amount of milk by putting it in after the tea. I’ve been drinking tea long enough that I think I know how much milk to use thankyouverymuch. Actually there’s a practical reason I put the milk in first. I put the sugar in the cup, and then the milk. Then I swirl it to dissolve the sugar and then add the tea. Saves me from dirtying a spoon.
Another vote (albeit a colonial one) for not using boiling water to make tea. If the water’s boiling, it’s deoxygenating - the tea will taste flat. You want to heat the water until it’s just below the boiling point.
Tea, like coffee, has a flavor peak. If you let it continue to steep past that point it will become bitter. Two to four minutes is good; then strain out the leaves.
And always use good water.
AIUI, tea bags use ‘dust’. This allows the tea to brew quickly, even with water that isn’t boiling. But the quality is not great. Still, you can get an okay cuppa tea with a bag if you’re not particular. And sometimes I’m not.
For general information, there are different kinds of tea.
Orthodox tea is rolled and twisted to break the veins in the leaves.
CTC tea is Cut, Torn and Curled.
Dust is the smallest grade, and is usually used in tea bags.