I haven't Googled it, because I'd rather hear from Shipmates here, but is there a freshness "window" with tea, especially looseleaf tea, like there is with coffee beans? There is actually a marked difference between grinding very recently roasted beans, and grinding roasted beans that have been on a shelf for a while. Is tea similar?
As long as you're storing the leaf tea in an airtight container away from light, it keeps ok for some months in my experience. We have several different tea tins, and a plastic box with a tight lid for mint teabags (otherwise everything in the cupboard would smell/taste of mint).
At university, I did drink instant freeze dried tea ...
That reminds me of a work canteen that always made me think of the drinks machine aboard the Heart of Gold spaceship, in that the liquid it served was almost exactly, but not quite, unlike tea. It was warm and brown, but shared no other common factor.
Ughh work canteen machine hot drinks......
We used to joke about what chemicals they might have added to make us more compliant
I made sun tea for years in the summer, but then I read it can encourage harmful bacteria to multiply, so I gave up on making it. I made a nice-tasting iced tea with no bite to it..
Has anyone mentioned sun tea or iced tea (expecting shocked reactions)?
I assumed this thread was only about hot tea. In my younger days, if you simply said “tea,” it was assumed you meant iced tea. That has changed, but good iced tea is a thing of beauty.
@Climacus, not exclusively Southern thing, but definitely associated with the South, especially “sweet tea” (which many in the South consider redundant). I will simply say that I find bottled iced tea undrinkable, and unsweetened tea pointless.
When I lived in Texas and had gestational diabetes while I was pregnant, I found unsweet tea very useful. It had neither sugar nor alcohol, but made a nice change from plain water. It did tend to get served with sugar on the side though, on the assumption that I would want to add my own.
Having said that, I've never really been tempted to drink it since then...
I personally drink some form of hot black tea with milk, but am very partial to iced tea/sweet tea as one of my parents is Southern originally, and am always caught off guard when I order iced tea in a restaurant up here and get unsweet tea with some sugar on the side.
Which is kind of pointless, as the sugar doesn’t dissolve well when the tea is ice-cold. I’ve been to a few restaurants that serve simple syrup with the unsweet tea (or “untea,” as some here call it). That makes much more sense to me.
A 110V kettle can be as fast as a 240V version as long as the power rating is the same. Watts = Volts x Amps, so the resistance of the heating element of the 110V kettle has to be a little less than half that of the 240V, i.e. half the volts and twice the amps, more or less. It does result in a heavy current, though, and as some North America appliances still don't have on/off switches, you get a big fat spark when you unplug them. (I've noticed that North American electricians always refer to the supply as 120V).
In fact the resistance has to be *four* times less to get twice the current with half the voltage.
You could just about get a 1kW kettle off a 110V supply with a hefty 9A current - I'm not surprised by the fat spark - but a 2kW "fast boil" kettle of the sort that's now common in the UK would require 18A, which is too much for typical power cables.
On things that can't really be described as tea - who's been to Taizé? That powdered lemon stuff they serve you is not tea in any meaningful sense and I would find it disgusting in any other context. Nonetheless Taizé is one of my happy places and the thought of that so-called tea fills me with nostalgic longing.
A 110V kettle can be as fast as a 240V version as long as the power rating is the same. Watts = Volts x Amps, so the resistance of the heating element of the 110V kettle has to be a little less than half that of the 240V, i.e. half the volts and twice the amps, more or less. It does result in a heavy current, though, and as some North America appliances still don't have on/off switches, you get a big fat spark when you unplug them. (I've noticed that North American electricians always refer to the supply as 120V).
In fact the resistance has to be *four* times less to get twice the current with half the voltage.
You could just about get a 1kW kettle off a 110V supply with a hefty 9A current - I'm not surprised by the fat spark - but a 2kW "fast boil" kettle of the sort that's now common in the UK would require 18A, which is too much for typical power cables.
Oh dear... quite right, of course. The brain must have slipped out of gear again. I need more coffee. (Just checked - our kettle in Canada is rated at 1.5kW).
Our regular tea is Co-op’ 99 blend loose leaf tea, and it makes a good cup. We also have Lapsang Souchong and Lady Grey leaf tea. Our Earl Grey is in bags - Twinings because they use the right kind of base tea.
I also have some rather fine oolong tea from a visit to South East China, but don’t make the effort to drink it enough.
I made sun tea for years in the summer, but then I read it can encourage harmful bacteria to multiply, so I gave up on making it. I made a nice-tasting iced tea with no bite to it..
Tea brewing in the sun never gets hot enough to kill bacteria, so there's a slight risk, which can be mitigated by sanitizing the container and starting the tea with a little bit of boiling water -- steep for 5 minutes, then pour into the container and fill up with room temp water. It's easier, I think, to just cold brew tea overnight in the fridge; to my taste, it has the same smooth finish as sun tea.
That said, I've made and consumed countless jars of sun tea all my life and never had anything go wrong. My parents had long teaspoons specifically for the endless stirring necessary if you wanted sugar. I always have simple syrup on hand for cocktails, and that's faster by far. I somehow didn't move the enormous glass mayo jar Mom saved for me from the church kitchen when I was in my 20s, so I've been using random mid-sized jars or those single-glass iced teabags that promise iced tea in 5 minutes (it's a lie -- it takes at least 10, and most aren't very good).
I haven't Googled it, because I'd rather hear from Shipmates here, but is there a freshness "window" with tea, especially looseleaf tea, like there is with coffee beans? There is actually a marked difference between grinding very recently roasted beans, and grinding roasted beans that have been on a shelf for a while. Is tea similar?
As long as you're storing the leaf tea in an airtight container away from light, it keeps ok for some months in my experience. We have several different tea tins, and a plastic box with a tight lid for mint teabags (otherwise everything in the cupboard would smell/taste of mint).
I haven't Googled it, because I'd rather hear from Shipmates here, but is there a freshness "window" with tea, especially looseleaf tea, like there is with coffee beans? There is actually a marked difference between grinding very recently roasted beans, and grinding roasted beans that have been on a shelf for a while. Is tea similar?
Not as much - though you do need to keep it in a relatively airtight containers. If you think about it, the surfaces that are exposed are already exposed when harvesting and remain so during processing in marked difference to a ground bean.
Another thing that affects tea is the hardness of the water; and I suspect many people in the UK have got used to the slightly more viscous and darker tea that results.
A 110V kettle can be as fast as a 240V version as long as the power rating is the same. Watts = Volts x Amps, so the resistance of the heating element of the 110V kettle has to be a little less than half that of the 240V, i.e. half the volts and twice the amps, more or less. It does result in a heavy current, though, and as some North America appliances still don't have on/off switches, you get a big fat spark when you unplug them. (I've noticed that North American electricians always refer to the supply as 120V).
In fact the resistance has to be *four* times less to get twice the current with half the voltage.
You could just about get a 1kW kettle off a 110V supply with a hefty 9A current - I'm not surprised by the fat spark - but a 2kW "fast boil" kettle of the sort that's now common in the UK would require 18A, which is too much for typical power cables.
Oh dear... quite right, of course. The brain must have slipped out of gear again. I need more coffee. (Just checked - our kettle in Canada is rated at 1.5kW).
Ours is the same. It’s almost 20 years old and still happily boiling away.
You could just about get a 1kW kettle off a 110V supply with a hefty 9A current - I'm not surprised by the fat spark - but a 2kW "fast boil" kettle of the sort that's now common in the UK would require 18A, which is too much for typical power cables.
US domestic electric sockets are generally 120V/15A. (NEC now requires two 20A circuits in the kitchen, but there are a lot of older installations that are 15A. 15A plugs fit in 20A sockets, but 20A plugs do not fit in 15A sockets. Look up NEMA 5-15 and NEMA 5-20 if you want to see the difference. As far as I know, precisely zero kettles on the general market have a 20A plug.)
Iced tea in the US is a spectrum thing. If you simply ask for iced tea, you will get it sweet in the South, unsweet in the North, and in the middle (like where I live) they will explicitly ask you, "sweet or unsweet"?
In the West it is typically not sweet if it's just plain tea, but all too often it's some kind of flavored monstrosity with sugar in it called "Tropical" or *Paradise" that's reddish, and only God and a multinational food conglomerate know what's in it.
The full horror of the following story may only be apparent to Brits or others who know exactly what an English "cream tea" is.
A few years ago I was on a coach day out with people from a local gardening group. Included was a stop at a posh garden centre for a cream tea. We had an elderly Indian lady with us who obviously didn't know what she was getting. When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
Heavens to Murgatroid ... the horror .... the horror!
It's not even wrong! As for 'Instant Tea' ......
Mrs RR, who is against everything 'instant' and any product which includes the phrase, 'just add ...' says we need a thread labelled like 'Crimes committed in the name of 'Instant'. Her list would include coffee (of course) but also custard.
My day always starts with a hot cup of English Breakfast tea served in a fine bone china cup - no thick mug for me. It starts with a teaspoon of milk before the tea is poured and sugar is never added. Some how the world seems better with such a beginning.
When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
With the right kind of tea, this might be kind of awesome. (I did enjoy cream tea when I visited England. Well, "enjoy" is an understatement. I could easily have arranged my whole day around where I was going to get a cream tea.)
@rhubarb, why do you prefer tea in a bone china cup over a thick mug? Does it just feel nicer or does it affect the tea?
When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
With the right kind of tea, this might be kind of awesome. (I did enjoy cream tea when I visited England. Well, "enjoy" is an understatement. I could easily have arranged my whole day around where I was going to get a cream tea.)
@rhubarb, why do you prefer tea in a bone china cup over a thick mug? Does it just feel nicer or does it affect the tea?
And doesn't it cool more rapidly -- do you find yourself drinking it quickly? Is there an appropriate timespan for drinking a cup?
When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
With the right kind of tea, this might be kind of awesome. (I did enjoy cream tea when I visited England. Well, "enjoy" is an understatement. I could easily have arranged my whole day around where I was going to get a cream tea.)
@rhubarb, why do you prefer tea in a bone china cup over a thick mug? Does it just feel nicer or does it affect the tea?
And doesn't it cool more rapidly -- do you find yourself drinking it quickly? Is there an appropriate timespan for drinking a cup?
Heavens to Murgatroid ... the horror .... the horror!
It's not even wrong! As for 'Instant Tea' ......
Mrs RR, who is against everything 'instant' and any product which includes the phrase, 'just add ...' says we need a thread labelled like 'Crimes committed in the name of 'Instant'. Her list would include coffee (of course) but also custard.
Ah - Instant Tea! I remember I think Typhoo marketing that in my youth. I tried a jar out of interest, just in case it might be convenient. I can't dispute the convenience of "combine a spoon of granules and a cup of boiling water", but I can certainly dispute the "tea".
When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
With the right kind of tea, this might be kind of awesome. (I did enjoy cream tea when I visited England. Well, "enjoy" is an understatement. I could easily have arranged my whole day around where I was going to get a cream tea.)
@rhubarb, why do you prefer tea in a bone china cup over a thick mug? Does it just feel nicer or does it affect the tea?
And doesn't it cool more rapidly -- do you find yourself drinking it quickly? Is there an appropriate timespan for drinking a cup?
Countless versions of this are passed off as 'cider,' too, especially at Holiday gatherings over here in the States. They are all equally awful.
Fortunately it has to be alcoholic (often very much so) to be called cider over here.
There's a tendency for 'apple juice' especially when unfiltered and unpasteurised to ferment naturally, as apples are covered in yeast hence the slippage (the flip side is the additional distinction between 'cider' and 'hard cider')
The full horror of the following story may only be apparent to Brits or others who know exactly what an English "cream tea" is.
A few years ago I was on a coach day out with people from a local gardening group. Included was a stop at a posh garden centre for a cream tea. We had an elderly Indian lady with us who obviously didn't know what she was getting. When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
In Nepal you are often served black tea with added yak butter instead of milk so she might have been from nearby North India and thought it was appropriate.
I did not acquire a taste for the yak butter tea 🤢 but I did enjoy tea from the Chai Wallah at the Indian train stations - tea, milk and sugar all boiled together and served in a clay pot to throw out of the window on your journey. I wouldn’t drink tea like that here in England (though boiling it up together was common in the homes of my Indian and Pakistani friends in the 1970s and 1980s) but when in Rome…
When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
With the right kind of tea, this might be kind of awesome. (I did enjoy cream tea when I visited England. Well, "enjoy" is an understatement. I could easily have arranged my whole day around where I was going to get a cream tea.)
@rhubarb, why do you prefer tea in a bone china cup over a thick mug? Does it just feel nicer or does it affect the tea?
And doesn't it cool more rapidly -- do you find yourself drinking it quickly? Is there an appropriate timespan for drinking a cup?
Countless versions of this are passed off as 'cider,' too, especially at Holiday gatherings over here in the States. They are all equally awful.
Fortunately it has to be alcoholic (often very much so) to be called cider over here.
Yes! We know that as "hard" cider. The real thing -- actual pressed apple cider -- is what those combinatory powdered concoctions are supposed to imitate. I just never thought any of them ever came remotely close, or understood why one wouldn't just heat real apple cider.
I’m a very committed tea drinker. I have a 14 oz teapot that I use pretty much exclusively with loose tea (no basket) from Harney and Sons, my favorite American blender. I have a gooseneck electric kettle that can do precise temperatures that I fill the pot from, and then after the tea is done steeping I pour it all through a strainer into a stoneware cup that holds the full teapot worth of tea and there you go! A perfect system for me.
Sounds so, yes. I wonder about the quantity thing. You know, as in the difference between a demitasse cup of espresso and a 28oz cafe americano. How much tea in one cup is a standard amount? Is it better to drink two separate smaller cups in the same sitting, or is one cup that's twice as big preferable? I'm not asking from a place of right/wrong, but more what's more widely practiced.
Quantity is a going concern. I have a little tea scoop that holds roughly 7.5 ml of tea and that is supposed to be for one 8 oz cup, so I put two level scoops in my pot and that seems to work well. At work I have a similar set up but with a smaller pot and cup (12 oz), and I use one heaping tea scoop and it works well.
I’m not sure if this all actually a good way of doing things, or if I’m just a process nerd and this is my *process*
I don't use my china teacups all that often because they're not dishwasher safe, but I do prefer them when I can be bothered. I like them because they're lighter than a crockery mug.
That said, even among the crockery mugs, I definitely have a favourite one. Apparently, as with different sorts of wine glasses, the shape of different drinking vessels changes the way you experience the smell of the drink. Makes sense to me.
There could be a whole thread on crockery mugs… my favourite is one I bought at the New York Transit Museum shop some years ago which I think is based on one of the MTA posters. A whimsical view of Grand Central Terminal with a bus somewhat improbably appearing to drive a tightrope over the building.
From the same trip (I think) also a mug from the Strand bookshop featuring a bookcase full of books and cats.
I suspect probably the drinking vessel does affect the overall experience of your tea though I have never experimented with that for tea. It certainly does with wine.
David (who was an inveterate tea drinker) always maintained that tea tasted better out of a china cup.
On the subject of milk, in Newfoundland (especially in rural areas) you had to specify "fresh milk" as otherwise you might get Carnation milk: a relic of the days when lack of transport to isolated communities meant fresh milk wasn't always available.
At church socials, there were always two milk jugs on the table, and you learned to notice which was which!
We buy PG tips teabags. I have to put a tea bag in a dark coloured mug with a dark inside. Fill 75% full of boiled water. After a few stirs, squeeze the tea bag and remove. Fill the cup with semi skimmed long life milk and leave the spoon in. ( I have no idea why I have to leave the spoon in )
Anything else would be totally unacceptable to Mrs Telford.
I had a friend once tell me her experience of Nigerian tea - a teabag dragged rapidly through cups of condensed milk.
In the Cape, that is what we call 'flou tee' or weak tea. You then add several teaspoons of refined white sugar to your faintly flavoured condensed milk and enjoy.
I drink local rooibos and honeybush tea (from the leaves of the Cyclopia bush) as well as matcha and various green tea combinations. The old regulars though are Earl Grey and English breakfast tea.
There are 3 tea drinkers in our family, most of the time we take the lazy way out with tea bags. Daughter likes a variety of teas sold in a tea shop so we have some looseleaf teas from there. There is a particular blend named after our city which reminds me of Anzac biscuits and is yummy. I don't drink it often, because it is quite sweet, it must have been made with some sort of syrup, I think.
Husband is not a tea drinker, so I had to get both the kids onto tea, so I would have someone to have a cuppa with at home. We have a variety of mugs, but I like the china ones best, kids are happy to use the thicker mugs, but I don't like them.
Our kettle has a number of temperature settings, daughter always boils the water at 100 degrees, I choose a slightly lower temperature, it has settings marked for different types of tea, green white and oolong. There is also a setting for coffee, which I have assumed is for instant. We don't have an espresso machine ourselves, but it's not unusual for very keen coffee lovers to have one at home.
I am not averse to using up some carnation milk in my tea, but son and I prefer our tea white, daughter likes green and black and tea with milk. No one takes sugar and I've noticed most of our visitors are no sugar or only half a teaspoon people.
When I was a small child I used to have instant tea when Mum and Dad had their coffee. I had a lot of trouble convincing my Granny that it was something that existed and I wasn't making it up. I don't know if anyone else remembers this product from the late 60's, early 70's. I am not sure if it is still made nowadays.
Bizarrely, I got quite fond of the taste of UHT milk in tea (because that's all we got on scout summer camp), and was quite disappointed that when we used up our In Case Of Self Isolation stock post-plague that it tasted much more like "real" milk than I remembered.
Nostalgia notwithstanding, I wouldnt make a cuppa with it now without bloody good reason, though.
I'm making a mug of rose petal tea right now. When I'm able to stay home, I use my old black teapot (my favorite of the seven or eight pots I own) and really enjoy getting to sit and sip for a while!
The black teapot was purchased before my lovely daughter was born, and I also have a teapot that was given to me when I was eighteen.
Our kettle has a number of temperature settings, daughter always boils the water at 100 degrees, I choose a slightly lower temperature, it has settings marked for different types of tea, green white and oolong. There is also a setting for coffee, which I have assumed is for instant.
Not necessarily. If you're making pour over coffee with freshly ground beans, you want the water to be around 200-205 F (93-96 C). Hotter than that, it's going to taste burnt.
We use long life all the time as fresh supplies don't always last. In tea I can't tell any difference.
Gack. UHT milk is vile, and I absolutely taste the difference. It was always a trial, when I spent time in France, to locate fresh milk in the supermarket. As I recall, the milk I ended up buying in the local French supermarket described itself as "microfiltered". It required refrigeration, but was said to last longer than ordinary milk. That still tastes different from actual milk, but the taste is much closer to normal than UHT is.
I have heard of people who keep long-life milk because they don't use much, so fresh would go off. That's not a problem I have - my household averages about a US gallon per day (a bit less now, because one of the cereal eaters is away at college.)
Comments
As long as you're storing the leaf tea in an airtight container away from light, it keeps ok for some months in my experience. We have several different tea tins, and a plastic box with a tight lid for mint teabags (otherwise everything in the cupboard would smell/taste of mint).
Ughh work canteen machine hot drinks......
We used to joke about what chemicals they might have added to make us more compliant
When I lived in Texas and had gestational diabetes while I was pregnant, I found unsweet tea very useful. It had neither sugar nor alcohol, but made a nice change from plain water. It did tend to get served with sugar on the side though, on the assumption that I would want to add my own.
Having said that, I've never really been tempted to drink it since then...
In fact the resistance has to be *four* times less to get twice the current with half the voltage.
You could just about get a 1kW kettle off a 110V supply with a hefty 9A current - I'm not surprised by the fat spark - but a 2kW "fast boil" kettle of the sort that's now common in the UK would require 18A, which is too much for typical power cables.
Oh dear... quite right, of course. The brain must have slipped out of gear again. I need more coffee. (Just checked - our kettle in Canada is rated at 1.5kW).
I also have some rather fine oolong tea from a visit to South East China, but don’t make the effort to drink it enough.
Tea brewing in the sun never gets hot enough to kill bacteria, so there's a slight risk, which can be mitigated by sanitizing the container and starting the tea with a little bit of boiling water -- steep for 5 minutes, then pour into the container and fill up with room temp water. It's easier, I think, to just cold brew tea overnight in the fridge; to my taste, it has the same smooth finish as sun tea.
That said, I've made and consumed countless jars of sun tea all my life and never had anything go wrong. My parents had long teaspoons specifically for the endless stirring necessary if you wanted sugar. I always have simple syrup on hand for cocktails, and that's faster by far. I somehow didn't move the enormous glass mayo jar Mom saved for me from the church kitchen when I was in my 20s, so I've been using random mid-sized jars or those single-glass iced teabags that promise iced tea in 5 minutes (it's a lie -- it takes at least 10, and most aren't very good).
That’s basically our experience too.
Not as much - though you do need to keep it in a relatively airtight containers. If you think about it, the surfaces that are exposed are already exposed when harvesting and remain so during processing in marked difference to a ground bean.
Another thing that affects tea is the hardness of the water; and I suspect many people in the UK have got used to the slightly more viscous and darker tea that results.
Ours is the same. It’s almost 20 years old and still happily boiling away.
US domestic electric sockets are generally 120V/15A. (NEC now requires two 20A circuits in the kitchen, but there are a lot of older installations that are 15A. 15A plugs fit in 20A sockets, but 20A plugs do not fit in 15A sockets. Look up NEMA 5-15 and NEMA 5-20 if you want to see the difference. As far as I know, precisely zero kettles on the general market have a 20A plug.)
Typical kettles sold in the US market are 1500W.
A few years ago I was on a coach day out with people from a local gardening group. Included was a stop at a posh garden centre for a cream tea. We had an elderly Indian lady with us who obviously didn't know what she was getting. When the food and drink was served, clotted cream in a little separate dish of course, she spooned the clotted cream into her cup of tea. Where it floated, revolving, before gradually sinking to the bottom of the cup.
https://youtu.be/nRz5A816hpc?si=V4TNw61JxSf9t-mz
Heavens to Murgatroid ... the horror .... the horror!
It's not even wrong! As for 'Instant Tea' ......
Mrs RR, who is against everything 'instant' and any product which includes the phrase, 'just add ...' says we need a thread labelled like 'Crimes committed in the name of 'Instant'. Her list would include coffee (of course) but also custard.
With the right kind of tea, this might be kind of awesome. (I did enjoy cream tea when I visited England. Well, "enjoy" is an understatement. I could easily have arranged my whole day around where I was going to get a cream tea.)
@rhubarb, why do you prefer tea in a bone china cup over a thick mug? Does it just feel nicer or does it affect the tea?
Countless versions of this are passed off as 'cider,' too, especially at Holiday gatherings over here in the States. They are all equally awful.
Fortunately it has to be alcoholic (often very much so) to be called cider over here.
Ah - Instant Tea! I remember I think Typhoo marketing that in my youth. I tried a jar out of interest, just in case it might be convenient. I can't dispute the convenience of "combine a spoon of granules and a cup of boiling water", but I can certainly dispute the "tea".
There's a tendency for 'apple juice' especially when unfiltered and unpasteurised to ferment naturally, as apples are covered in yeast hence the slippage (the flip side is the additional distinction between 'cider' and 'hard cider')
I did not acquire a taste for the yak butter tea 🤢 but I did enjoy tea from the Chai Wallah at the Indian train stations - tea, milk and sugar all boiled together and served in a clay pot to throw out of the window on your journey. I wouldn’t drink tea like that here in England (though boiling it up together was common in the homes of my Indian and Pakistani friends in the 1970s and 1980s) but when in Rome…
Yes! We know that as "hard" cider. The real thing -- actual pressed apple cider -- is what those combinatory powdered concoctions are supposed to imitate. I just never thought any of them ever came remotely close, or understood why one wouldn't just heat real apple cider.
I’m not sure if this all actually a good way of doing things, or if I’m just a process nerd and this is my *process*
That said, even among the crockery mugs, I definitely have a favourite one. Apparently, as with different sorts of wine glasses, the shape of different drinking vessels changes the way you experience the smell of the drink. Makes sense to me.
From the same trip (I think) also a mug from the Strand bookshop featuring a bookcase full of books and cats.
I suspect probably the drinking vessel does affect the overall experience of your tea though I have never experimented with that for tea. It certainly does with wine.
On the subject of milk, in Newfoundland (especially in rural areas) you had to specify "fresh milk" as otherwise you might get Carnation milk: a relic of the days when lack of transport to isolated communities meant fresh milk wasn't always available.
At church socials, there were always two milk jugs on the table, and you learned to notice which was which!
Anything else would be totally unacceptable to Mrs Telford.
Long Life??!! 😲 That is a sure fire way of ruining a cup of tea
In the Cape, that is what we call 'flou tee' or weak tea. You then add several teaspoons of refined white sugar to your faintly flavoured condensed milk and enjoy.
I drink local rooibos and honeybush tea (from the leaves of the Cyclopia bush) as well as matcha and various green tea combinations. The old regulars though are Earl Grey and English breakfast tea.
We use long life all the time as fresh supplies don't always last. In tea I can't tell any difference.
Husband is not a tea drinker, so I had to get both the kids onto tea, so I would have someone to have a cuppa with at home. We have a variety of mugs, but I like the china ones best, kids are happy to use the thicker mugs, but I don't like them.
Our kettle has a number of temperature settings, daughter always boils the water at 100 degrees, I choose a slightly lower temperature, it has settings marked for different types of tea, green white and oolong. There is also a setting for coffee, which I have assumed is for instant. We don't have an espresso machine ourselves, but it's not unusual for very keen coffee lovers to have one at home.
I am not averse to using up some carnation milk in my tea, but son and I prefer our tea white, daughter likes green and black and tea with milk. No one takes sugar and I've noticed most of our visitors are no sugar or only half a teaspoon people.
When I was a small child I used to have instant tea when Mum and Dad had their coffee. I had a lot of trouble convincing my Granny that it was something that existed and I wasn't making it up. I don't know if anyone else remembers this product from the late 60's, early 70's. I am not sure if it is still made nowadays.
Yes I know and I’ve never had a decent cup of tea in France
Nostalgia notwithstanding, I wouldnt make a cuppa with it now without bloody good reason, though.
The black teapot was purchased before my lovely daughter was born, and I also have a teapot that was given to me when I was eighteen.
Not necessarily. If you're making pour over coffee with freshly ground beans, you want the water to be around 200-205 F (93-96 C). Hotter than that, it's going to taste burnt.
I dare not do anything diferent
Gack. UHT milk is vile, and I absolutely taste the difference. It was always a trial, when I spent time in France, to locate fresh milk in the supermarket. As I recall, the milk I ended up buying in the local French supermarket described itself as "microfiltered". It required refrigeration, but was said to last longer than ordinary milk. That still tastes different from actual milk, but the taste is much closer to normal than UHT is.
I have heard of people who keep long-life milk because they don't use much, so fresh would go off. That's not a problem I have - my household averages about a US gallon per day (a bit less now, because one of the cereal eaters is away at college.)
... Tang?