My favorite tea is loose-leaf English Breakfast (usually from Twinings or Ahmed), but I’m perfectly happy with Lipton teabags if EB isn’t available.
Fun Fact: When McDonald’s opened in Russia in January 1990, it sold tea but **not **coffee. IIRC, it didn’t start offering coffee until the second restaurant opened on the Arbat in February 1994. (I was at both events, the first when I was working for US network television news and the second for the commercial radio station where I was employed.)
Meaningless anecdote. I took a train from Aberdeen to London a few years ago and we had wandering tea ladies. The train took pretty much all day and our morning tea lady poured the milk in first. In the afternoon, we had a different tea lady and she poured the milk in second.
Seconded. Like a lot of ALDI products, it’s good quality and very inexpensive.
I love a good cup of tea, but have become much more sensitive to caffeine as I’ve aged. I don’t know how my British friends handle so much caffeine in a day.
PG is ok, but the best is Yorkshire Tea.
I wonder if there is a cheat sheet somewhere? Like, maybe English Breakfast is not available everywhere, but, assuming there is tea, they will probably always have “Nilgiri”, “Assam”, “Ceylon”, etc. (Personally, I could not be bothered to blend anything myself, though, and would just drink straight Nilgiri/Darjeeling/Lapsang Souchong/whatever depending on what I felt like)
Yes. Yorkshire Gold is best, but Yorkshire Red is also acceptable. I don’t care for PG at all.
I first encountered the “thing” about what to put into the cup first in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945), where the portentous Col. Blimp of a father sneered that another character was the type to pour the milk first.
I do it to save washing another spoon, which signifies, I guess, that I don’t keep a host of servants for that sort of thing.
I once, for fun, asked on a certain “travel” forum what the first thing was most people not in the “Anglosphere” did on getting home from a trip, knowing that British/Irish/Anzacs would almost always say “Put the kettle on”.
The first reply was from an American, who simply said “I look for cat vomit”.
And as for the automatic resort to “British penicillin” in a crisis, I recall a soap opera scene where the family issue was so serious the tea was taken as read. Barely had [whoever] said “,Mum, I’ve got something to tell you” but the matriarch put on her resolute look, pulled her cardigan tightly about her, and said “Right I’ll fetch the biscuits, shall I?”
And let’s not forget:
Nilgiri/Darjeeling/Lapsang are definitely in their own categories (though I guess Lapsang and Russian Caravan are similar enough to substitute with each other). Breakfast blends tend to be heavy on the Assam (so stronger, darker, heavier, reviving) and afternoon blends more like Ceylon (so lighter, crisper, high notes, more refreshing).
OB
**
I** know! How about some nice cheese?
Don’t forget the crackers! 
In some British crime show I was watching several years ago (maybe someone will recognize it from this), in the first episode a guy hires some killers to murder his boss (or was it his wife…). This was not a spoof or a comedy (was it Broadchurch?)-- these were murdering thugs, and they do carry out the murder, which turns out to be a very bad mistake on the part of the one who hired them.
When they get together at their grimy digs to plot how to carry out the deed, the first thing one of them says is, “I’ll put the kettle on!” It wasn’t supposed to be funny, but I laughed out loud.
Not Broadchurch. Might it be the (I think) second series of Happy Valley*, where that particular storyline echoed the plot of the movie Fargo?
- Steve Pemberton had a hand in it, and an incongruously mundane line like that is just his style. Now there was a programme that demanded to be watched with a pot of tea and a packet of custard creams.
I’m a US tea drinker, definitely not an expert, I just know what I like. My favorite tea is Lapsang Souchong, a rather smoky flavored tea. I first heard of it in a novel by James Michener, Centennial. In the 1830’s mountain men in the west of North America have gathered for a great rendezvous and many merchants are there to buy from them, and others to sell them supplies. One of the characters, a Scot, has a seller pitch him the tea. I thought the description intriguing and got some myself.
YES! It was Happy Valley, which ought to have been named “Unhappy Valley.” Great series though.
Still waiting for a Brit (or anyone who knows) weigh in on the tea vs. milk in the cup first question. Are “milk first” people low-class ditch-diggers and scullions, or not? Am I displayin’ a certain lacka couth?
My wife, who has edited over a hundred Regency romance novels, has never heard of this.
Not long ago, there was another thread about British/Irish tea habits where a Briton member wrote one of the funniest posts I’ve read here. A long paragraph written to disabuse the Yanks of the idea of pinky-lifting, monocle-wearing English sipping fine blends out of delicate china at Fortnum & Mason. So, a recipe for Normal English Tea.
A few lines I remember were
- The full kettle of water must be boiled, even if you’re only making one mug
- Insert in mug one teabag shoplifted from (English discount grocery chain), filled with floor sweepings from the tea factory
- Add lots of milk and four spoons of white sugar
- Leave the half-finished mug in an unlikely spot until it turns brackish
Anybody remember who this was? I’ve been looking for the post, but “tea” is too short to search. I want to print it out and hang it next to the kettle.
The quality of milk in first / last is a minor issue relative to the potential catastrophe of misjudging the quantity of milk. I feel that milk in first is more dangerous in this respect - the novice risks the grevious faux pas of serving up a milky brew.
This page has a bunch of links (eg to the Royal Society of Chemistry) advising to pour milk into the cup first, followed by the tea. On the other hand, if you make the tea in a mug rather than a pot, it clearly warns you not to put in a tea bag with the milk before pouring in water since the water will cool too quickly in that case.
ETA there are also Orwellian recommendations to pour the tea in first so as to more easily regulate the amount of milk… then again I’ve seen (Indian, not English!) recipes involving up to 50% milk!
I’ve had tea in Malaysia made with condensed milk.
Not an experience I’d care to replicate at home.
And yes, I"m a tea-firster, for all the reasons DPRK indicates. I don’t see this as a class issue.
Now, while we’re on tea-related controversies: jam first or cream first?
Cream, of course! Topped with strawberry jam.
While we’re on the subject: If you can’t find real Devonshire clotted cream, mascarpone cheese makes a wonderful substitute! :o