Christopher Hitchens, in Why Orwell Matters:
“His long essay on how to make a proper pot of tea is highly orthodox, down to the crucial detail of taking the pot to the kettle instead of the kettle to the pot.”
What’s that mean, and what’s the result if you fail to do it?
According to tea purists like Orwell and Hitchens, the water needs to still be boiling (at least100 degrees Celsius) the moment it first touches the tea leaves. Otherwise, not all of the flavor is extracted from the leaves, and the tea doesn’t brew properly. That means that the teapot must be right next to the boiling kettle, because during the few seconds it takes to carry a kettle across the kitchen to a pot, the water will drop below boiling and the tea will be ruined.
And to clarify further, you boil the water in the kettle, but do the actual brewing in the pot.
IOW, it’s tedious fan-wankery having no impact in the real world. But much beloved of pedantic purists.
The obvious thing to do is bring the water to at least 214F to compensate for the travel time.
:deadpan:
It also depends critically on the fact that most of the UK is near sea level. Proper tea above ~1000 feet above sea level where the boiling temp is a mere 210F is simply impossible.
That would be a paradise for anarchists. They despise proper tea.
What about the crucial issue of whether to pour the milk into the cup first, or the tea first, or to pour them at the same time? (This is from the pot, after the tea has brewed, if that was not clear). I believe wars have been fought over this point.
At home, I pour the milk into the cup first, while the water is heating, which gives the milk time to come up to room temperature, thereby cooling the tea off less. (Actually, I brew a huge pot and pour it into a thermos and a travel mug. It’s about 1.6 liters all together. Lasts me for 3 hours or so.)
Go to your room.
ETA: @Roderick_Femm two above.
I preheat my cup filled with water in the microwave ~2 minutes. Then dump that water, add cream or milk, and heat that in the microwave ~30 seconds. This in a much warmer climate and warmer building interior than is common anywhere in the UK.
Only then is my reception environment ready to accept the boiling hot and oh so carefully steeped tea. Or the dripped coffee as my philistine tastes may decree.
Go big hot or go home.
Bold, sweeping proclamation.
Vegetable tannin sources (such as tea, but more often various tree barks, leaves, roots, or seeds) yield markedly different compositions depending on the exact seeping temperature (among other things). Extractives at 100 C are indeed different from extractives at 90 C etc.
Yes, I think I’ll install a hyperbaric chamber in my kitchen.
It will make cooking a lot of other things faster too…
This “bringing the pot to the kettle” rule assumes there is some walking distance between the two vessels. In my house, the teapot is about two feet from the electric kettle. It’s a non-issue.
LSLGuy, your mug/milk preheating routine is exactly what I follow. Can’t have a cold mug and cold milk cooling your tea down too quickly. I like my first sip of tea hot enough to scald if I’m incautious. And in my one-mug sized little teapot, I must use high quality loose-leaf Assam, because other teas just taste too wimpy by comparison.
I agree with this point completely. And if you were able to use superheated water at 110C, the extractive profile would be different yet again.
The profile also differs based on the age of the steeping material, how it was ground, how it’s been stored, etc. And on the impurities in the water, amount and type of dissolved gases, etc.
Science! is always valid.
Where we might part ways is in the culinary prescription that 100C water is the absolute best, and 99C water produces a notably inferior brew. That’s the part where IMO fussy peculiarity has taken up residence. And for folks residing even in fairly low high terrain, 99 or 98 or 97C may be the max temp of a rolling boil. What of their tea? Doomed for life to drink inferior swill? Seems a harsh sentence.
Noting all the recent excitement about cold brewed this or that, or the ever-popular “sun tea” suggest there are many ways to get culinarily useful brews. How different are they really? IMO that answer is “Some, but not a lot.”
Cool, but what’s that got to do with walking a kettle over to the pot? Do you cook in a walk-in freezer? Or were you just trying to give examples of “tedious fan wankery?”
Anyway, the actual crucial detail that Orwell missed is that you take the pot to the harbor, throw it in there, and make coffee.
It’s wankery. There’s no appreciable heat loss walking the kettle over to the teapot vs having it right next to the pot so you can pour the 100C water in immediately. Even with my rusty thermodynamics, a half liter of water at 100C in a thin walled stainless steel kettle will take half a minute to drop 1C and at least 4-5 mins to drop 10C.
I’m always amused by Orwell’s essay, in that he goes on this big tirade against people who add sugar to their tea, because those folks don’t actually like the taste of tea and they’re masking it with the sugar, but he takes completely for granted that one ought to dilute the tea with an equal measure of milk. Out of my teaspoon of sugar or his half milk, which one of us is masking the flavor?
After boiling the water, I have to move my tea kettle through a liquid helium bath in order to get it to the pot – it’s just the way my kitchen is set up. So, I get better results swimming the pot over to the kettle.
The principle stems from a time when domestic central heating was rare to unknown in the UK, so “walk-in freezer” is only a slight exaggeration 
Also, of course, this all applies to black Indian tea. Other teas are available and have their own brewing requirements.
Yep.
I can see that a crockery teapot stored in an exterior wall cupboard in an unheated kitchen might be at 40F/10C. Then you dump some 40F/10C tea leaves in there. Then you dump in the hot water. Then wait a couple minutes, then pour the steeped tea into a 40F cup that had 35F milk put in it a few minutes ago. Then you sip the tepid tea.
In that environment, every extra degree F you can add to the initial water temp improves the palatability of the end result.
But most of the stupidity is in not preheating the teapot and cup and milk. That’s where all the heat is going.
Admittedly it’s a lot easier to preheat that stuff today than it was when Orwell was bloviating.