I don’t know why, but every time I go over to the Continent the hotels always seem to have Lipton teabags on offer at breakfast. Lipton is vile, vile swill. I may start bringing my own tea when I travel.
Oh I’m cool with any breakfast tea really. I’m not one of those who has to have loose leaf tea from a pot, brewed to perfection. I like Tetleys and I like Liptons Yellow Label. My point was that I didn’t think it was possible to mess up when making a cup of tea with a teabag: put teabag in mug, boil kettle, pour water onto teabag, take teabag out, put milk in, I didn’t see where it could go wrong. You don’t even need to take the teabag out and it’ll still be OK.
But, according to people in this thread, it does indeed get messed up…
I also get round the lack of a coffee maker here at work (we do have an electric kettle, of course, being in the UK!) by using these individual coffee filters. They make a passably good cup of filter coffee and still work out cheaper than the crap out of the drinks machine.
Not exactly fixed: it depended upon when the tea lady got to us.
What’s a litre? Is that pronounce “leetree”?
On the slightly tenuous assumption that this isn’t a facetious whoosh, it’s pronounced the same as “liter”, but spelled how it is in Europe.
Oh, me too. We drank PG Tips in our house. I drink Twinings Earl Grey now, because it’s the only tea I can buy at US supermarket that doesn’t have a hint of buttcheek in its flavor.
I’m just saying, the Liptons teabags sold here are worse than you can possibly imagine. Plus, many Americans don’t understand the “boil” part of the process; they assume that “really hot” is good enough.
Nitpick: Earl Grey is flavored with extract of bergamot peel, not orange. It’s a different citrus fruit.
Yes! I had forgot about that! Many coffee machines (like the one in my office) have a red lever that dispenses hot but not quite boiling water. People use that for tea all the time, whilst crowing about the fancy-fancy teabags they have.
Americans manage to turn a simple pleasure like tea into something both gross (lipton with warm water) and a nightmare of social signals.
pdts
I know!! It’s like saying you don’t have a plate or a saucepan. Bizarre…
They’re also more efficient for boiling water for cooking too. Fill the kettle, boil it, turn on the hob, pour the water into the pan, put on the hob - voila, boiling water ready to cook with, in about 2 minutes.
Just like the The Nutramatic beverage machine - it produces something which is almost , but not quite , entirely unlike tea.
If you look hard enough you can probably find PG Tips in the US - I don’t know where you’re located but I’ve seen it in a big grocery store on the east coast (Wegmans, don’t know how far-spread the chain is) and World Market (which I think is national, but might be west-coast centric).
As for hot vs. boiling water, that drives me insane. I live at high altitude and water boils at about 198 degrees here, so it’s pretty much physically impossible to get a perfect cup of tea. Which led to my getting comically pissed off last winter when I was back east visiting my parents, foolishly ordered a cup of tea instead of coffee while out for breakfast, and was presented with a mug of barely-hot water and a tea bag. If I’m in a place where water can be 212 degrees and still liquid, my tea damn well better be made with hot water. (The waitress did not question my anger and happily swapped it for coffee.)
No Wegmans stores in Florida, or not in Central Florida at any rate. We’ve got Publix, Winn-Dixie, Albertson’s, Super Wal*Mart/Target, and Goodings. Probably a couple more I forgot. None stock PG Tips.
We have got a British supermarket (imaginatively titled British Supermarket) serving the huge British expat community, but it’s all the way across town and everything there is hyper-expensive.
You certainly can find decent tea on the shelves in the US – but it is likely to be stale from being on the shelves for so long.
pdts
That would surprise me - most tea (either bags or loose leaves) is hermetically sealed in foil pouches these days, which should keep it pretty fresh.
The brand I drink, Yorkshire Tea*, isn’t - it just comes in a cardboard box with an outer shrinkwrap - but it doesn’t get much of a chance to go stale!
- grown on the rarefied tea plantations of Ilkley Moor
In my experience (NC) teabags mostly come in little individual paper wrappers, not foil ones.
I don’t know about the staleness thing myself – but I do know that tea in the USA is much less refreshing! I had always put it down to merely warm water.
pdts
Electric kettles are available in the U.S. I have one sitting at the end of my desk not 3 feet from me at this minute. How else am I going to make tea in my office? I bought it at Bed, Bath & Beyond, if anyone’s looking for one–they have several types from ridiculously expensive to nicely cheap.
Trying to make tea in a hotel room in the States is a very different matter from the same in any reasonable hotel or B&B in the UK. If they have coffee-making facilities and provide tea bags among the coffee things (which isn’t always the case), you can make a hot and somewhat coffee-flavored beverage using the coffee-makers without a filter. Goodness knows I’ve done it often enough.
Of course they’re available. I don’t think anyone’s seriously disputing that. However, we bought a Rival kettle at Wal*Mart when we moved her in 1996, and were shocked to discover something when we got home: it whistles. Why does it whistle? Because it’s got no automatic shutoff, or, in fact, an on/off switch of any kind. You literally have to yank the plug out of the wall to shut it off.
Turning liquid consumables into mass-market crap is an American art form.