Before you start you may see the read time and think no way!
To summarise: We need to find how you make tea now, please click on the link and fill out the form.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc1tmdNlFcaiIbXvwmRI7ldsm4e9kP_SuHl2_dOz2IzkOeWzQ/viewform?usp=sf_link
Now if you wish to con-tea-nue and find out why we are doing this please do read on.
So how are we going to do this? All good experiments start with background research.
I have searched high and low…ok I just googled it….for any research involving tea, all of it is about the nutrients you get, and how green tea helps prevent cancer, but also doesn’t. None of it is about how to make the best cup of tea.
If you Google “how to make the best cup of tea” you are flooded with articles by chefs or tea company’s saying they know the only way. The telegraph says “be patient” wait until it is exactly 60 degrees, which takes 6 minutes and it will be perfect. This is a silly claim, what happens if I add a lot more or less milk than them and then it is in fact 55 degrees or 70 degrees after 6 minutes. Ah but the article says 60 degrees I hear you say, yes it does, but answer this, who here whips out a thermometer every time they have a cup of tea…. anyone? Didn’t think so.
Jamie Oliver bangs on about making your own teabags, the fact that porcelain mugs are the best, the 96 degree MINERAL water!..again what a totally unrealistic aim.
My favourite theme that has come out of researching tea is this:
“Use a good quality tea bag”
Apparently it makes all the difference! So please enlighten me, what is a good quality tea bag? Isn’t it all personal preference? My mum loves twinning’s (the golden goddess of tea bags I hear the faithful whispering). My mother in law hates it because it doesn’t brew strong enough. And no one can say well lidl/aldi tea bags are poor quality just because they are cheap, just look at their award winning gin!
Alas, Tea is a complicated teaspoon of dried leaves.* Even though all these tea bags are different doesn’t mean we can’t come up with a way to make “the best cup of tea”.
Tea, as I’m sure you all know, is personal preference, normally to do with milk, strength and sugar. If you follow the recipes your mothers/fathers taught you, you will end up with a satisfactory cup of tea. But can we come up with an excellent one? I think so.
After looking at research we decide what the question that we want to answer is. My question is this; ‘is there truly a way in which you can make a better cup of tea?’
To answer that question we need to start with some simpler questions. So the first one I am going to ask is, how do we actually make tea now, and from this can we categorise tea drinkers? Comparing whether a weak milky highly sugared tea can be made the same way as a strong black tea is pointless. So can we find a way to categorise strengths and types of tea and then will each strength and type follow similar principles, that produce excellent results each time?
I think we can, but we need to make some exclusions from our experiment:
1. Fruit Tea’s and Black Breakfast Tea; that is a totally different ball game, which can be a different blog stream.
2. “Silver Tea” you know that warm milk and sugar combination where the tea bag throws a passing glance towards the mug? Again not Tea and no point.
3. Adding Sugar. I am not suggesting that Tea with sugar is not Tea. Simply that it is unlikely to change the brewing process. But to do that, we have to make the assumption that all sugar preferences will be added after the tea is otherwise complete and if you are testing to add the same amount each time.
4. Porcelain or not, again as Jamie says it makes a difference, but we don’t want the best tea to only be limited to porcelain do we?
These exclusions/assumptions mean we can investigate the rest of the variables of brewing.
To start with I need your help. How do we make Tea now? We need to find a baseline. The true way of measuring whether or not we discover a superior brewing technique is to see how we all brew now and whether our practice changes. So can you go to the link and fill out the information about your current tea making formula and this will be the basis of our investigation.
Liam
*at this point the author would like to point out that the drink has a spoon named after it
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