I’m sort of a beginner regarding this subject, and have several questions.
Do you find any difference in taste between various kinds of tea? In other words, do individual baggies of Red Rose tea from Fred Meyer taste about the same as the best Oolong?
Is decaffeinated tea OK? I’m trying to cut down on the caffeine a bit.
Do any of you Dopers have a particular preference for a particular tea?
What is your preferred method of brewing.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
If you’re looking for basic tea, you want orange pekoe. (Despite its name, it does not have orange flavoring.)
For better quality, you want tea that resembles leaves or pieces of leaves. The low quality stuff resembles dust. This is one reason why a lot of people prefer loose tea to tea bags; the bags make it easier to sell tea dust.
I have no problem with decaffeinated tea but I often drink a cup of tea for the caffeine so that’s what I usually buy.
I like Bigelow brand tea. It’s a decent quality, it has a good variety, it’s widely available, and it’s reasonably priced. I also like the fact that the teabags are individually wrapped, which I feel helps preserve the flavor and makes it easier to carry a tea bag or two in my pocket for when I was working.
My method of making tea would probably appall many tea drinkers. I fill my tea mug from the tap and heat the water up in a microwave. As far as I’m concerned you don’t need to make a fancy ritual out of heating up some water.
And I just heat it up to hot; I don’t boil the water. That makes the water “flat” (boiling drives out the air which is normally dissolved in water). I think the idea of boiling water for tea just goes back to historical times when you needed to boil water to make it safe to drink.
Oolong is definitely a different thing than black tea. It’s about halfway in between black and green. Personally, I much prefer black.
If it’s late enough in the day that I don’t want caffeine, then I drink decaffeinated. I very seldom actively want caffeination, but if it’s in the morning, I usually default to caffeinated. I don’t know if I can actually taste a difference or not, but I imagine that there is a small difference.
Of teas easily available in the US (i.e., found at a typical grocery store), my favorite brand is Stash. I should also, however, give a recommendation for Benner, the house brand at Aldi: It’s not the best, but still pretty good (comparable to Bigelow), and it’s also, by far, the most inexpensive tea you’ll find anywhere.
A microwave is just fine for heating up the water, and possibly actually better than using a kettle, because the water isn’t being cooled by the mug itself. Just heat up the water first (ideally, to just barely below boiling), and then put in the tea: Don’t microwave it with the tea already in the mug.
That said, some people enjoy the ritual aspect of it. Nothing wrong with that, if that’s your thing.
After a lifetime of not caring for tea probably due to bleh-quality iced tea that’s everywhere, I got into loose-leaf tea from Teavana, back before they got bought by Starbucks. I still stick with loose-leaf tea that I order online, so that may not help a lot if you’re just looking at a grovery store isle–but if there’s an option for white tea, that’s tea that is picked at a different time and as a result has very low caffeine, rather than regular black tea going through a decaffination process.
Yorkshire Gold is the gold standard. It’s an English black breakfast tea that is SO good I gave up my morning coffee four years ago.
I just drop a teabag into my 12 oz Price & Kensington teapot, boil some water in the electric kettle, and steep for five minutes. Pour into an 8 oz Fiesta cup with a couple of splashes of milk at the bottom, and enjoy on the deck with a cigarette or two (makes enough for two cups).
I look forward to those two cuppas more than any coffee I’ve ever brewed.
I don’t hold with any of those finger-raising English methods…in fact, one of our British colleagues is sure to drop by this thread, and repost his brilliant entry on how a Proper English Person makes his tea. Hint: no finger-raising.
Try Tearunners. Lots of variety. You are sure to find something you like.
There is a huge difference between types of teas.
I’ve never tried decaf tea
My favorite is raw puer. Every puer is different, and there’s a huge difference between the raw and fermented. Oolongs than lean green are my second choice.
I’m still working out my favorite brewing method. I have a japanese tetsubin, but i usually just use my french press. I have a feeling that i’d be better off with a chinese tea pot. I still need to research the different chinese brewing methods before i spend any more on tea stuff.
I am one of the lowest forms of humanity–a tea snob (thankfully we’re above Trump supporters)–and I strongly disagree. For black tea it must be boiling. I used to think it didn’t matter and rolled my eyes at those who insisted. I use only loose-leaf and early on I used to get the hot water from the espresso machine spigots but one day I got an electric kettle and I could immediately tell a difference.
Daylite, I never buy tea bags; I use a mug infuser like this with loose-leaf tea. The qualify of loose-leaf is much higher than tea bags and there are a ton of options. IMO using the mug infuser is only trivially more work than a tea bag but I’m in the minority on this. Apparently I have a reputation at work for giving out tea at work to my coworkers, who try it for a while and then go back to the simplicity of tea bags. Oh well.
If you want to give it a try, check out www.uptontea.com; I haven’t found anybody with a better quality selection.
Can’t go wrong with those Chinese clay teapots for fine tea, although they do warn you that the pot can absorb some of the tea flavours therefore you should avoid brewing up different types of tea in the same pot (black and green, for example).
For making large amounts of strong tea glass teapots work; another utensil to consider is the tea bowl, but most of the time I use a pot.
There is no overwhelming reason why high-quality tea could not be put in bags, but it is usually sold by weight, and I’m sure one can at least imagine situations where it might slow down the diffusion or something.
Try the following just once for an experiment - using loose leaves the better the quality the better the result.
Heat up a vacuum flask with boiling water, tip that water out - put in your tea leaves, fill around 1/3 boiling water, securely fasten the cap on - give the flask a good old cocktail shake and allow the tea to steep for a couple of minutes.
Now pour and serve.
You should note a significant difference - it is too much of a faff to do all the time but it does prove the point about the dissolved air.
Seeing as I’m British, I thought I’d wade in. (Actually, I don’t drink tea :eek: but the wife drinks plenty).
There’s a HUGE variety in flavour type and strength across different varieties of tea, so what you go for is really going to be a lifetime of experimentation.
However, for basic black tea, you’ll get a lot more flavour out of loose tea than a teabag.
The wife drinks Yorkshire gold loose tea out of a traditional teapot. 3.5 teaspoons to a single server pot, with boiling water. Steep for five minutes, strain into cup and add a dash of milk.
When she travels overseas, she takes Yorkshire Gold teabags as a convenient substitute - the stuff you get in hotels apparently tastes like dust. Much of the stuff you find in the US is weaker than what we drink (even the stuff labelled ‘English Breakfast Tea’), perhaps because so many people drink it iced or with lemon, rather than milk.
I should add, my wife drank from teabags all her life but switched in a desire to reduce plastic waste (most teabags have microplastics in them). It’s how she discovered the improved flavour of the loose variety.
If we’re talking teaware, I highly recommend the ingenuiTEA by Adagio.
It lets you make a cup of tea from loose leaves very easily. It’s all plastic so you can heat it up in a microwave. It’s easy to clean. It’s durable.
You can buy the teamaker by itself or as part of a pack that comes with some tea.
As others have said, there’s no reason that you can’t put good tea in a teabag. You can hide low-quality tea in a bag more easily, but the solution to that is to just avoid the low-quality brands. And I agree that loose tea is about as convenient as bags, but it’s harder to find in the US (you certainly can, but it might mean going to a different store from the rest of your groceries just to buy tea, or ordering it online, or the like).
I’m always amused when I see Brits saying that weaker varieties can be drunk without milk. So can strong varieties, and that’s the way I like mine. Especially amusing is when a milk-adder complains about people adding sugar to their tea, which interferes much less with the flavor than milk does.
That is interesting, but in what essential does it differ from a small teapot, besides being made of plastic and not having to tilt it to pour? Is it especially designed for travel since it’s microwaveable?
PS I once saw an entire portable tea set, made of nice ceramic, which packs up into a small padded case. No idea where the guy picked it up- Hong Kong?
I’ll give Upton a look. I’ve mentioned Harney’s here before, both for their selection and general tea education.
On temperature, it can make a gigantic difference in the quality of a brewed pot of coffee, so it’s not surprising it matters a lot to the quality of a pot of tea. For coffee, I find off the boil, around 205 F, is best. Boiling water makes the brew too bitter, unpleasant. Black tea though is different.
My question is, boiling water at sea level—once the dissolved air matter is taken care of—is preferable to lower water temperature. Has anyone tried making tea in a pressure cooker though? If so, what’s the temperature where the quality of the brew decreases?
By “set” I mean a porcelain tea pot, tea cups, water pitcher, tea towel, tea spoon, tea pick, and the rest of the works.
I once visited a tea plantation in Sri Lanka whilst on holiday. It was very interesting to see how they picked the leaves and processed them. I learned that tea is green and only goes black if it is dampened, spread out and allowed to oxidise.
At the end of the tour we had a nice brew and I asked our guide what their opinion of the tea found in tea bags. I got a very sniffy answer.
‘Sir, such ‘tea’ is the sweepings from our floor’
That certainly told me. I resolved to stick to loose leaf tea from then on, if at all possible. I does make a big difference.
It occurred to me that, were one utterly cheap, one wouldn’t want to pay for the extra extravagance of bags when purchasing one’s floor sweepings.
The fact that it has the valve and strainer in the bottom, means it automatically filters out the leaves from the tea.
I used to live near their headquarters in Millerton, New York. They have a great salesroom you can visit where they offer you samples of their teas.