Yahoo News How to make the perfect cuppa
A cloven Tory party. The best way to deal with Vladimir Putin. Solutions to the hastening energy crisis. These are just some of the matters that divide and animate the nation at the moment, and because Telegraph readers are always on the pulse, each of them has lit the blue touchpaper of our Letters page lately, too.
In the grand scheme of things, though, nuclear Armageddon or the governance of our country become distinct non-issues when you introduce the big question of our times and, indeed, all times before us: “What is the correct way to make tea?”
It started with this: “SIR – A single teabag used in a teapot will produce four strong cups and avoids mess. Given that Britain consumes roughly 61 billion teabags each year, say at a penny a time, I calculate that approximately £450 million could be saved annually.”
Did Maxwell Blake of London have a background in making wildly incendiary comments, or perhaps a police record teeming with charges for disturbing the peace? There wasn’t time to investigate; the pitchforks were at the door.
“SIR – I was horrified to read that Maxwell Blake squeezes four cups from a single teabag. That would never happen in my house. I once went out with a man who suggested I make two cups from one teabag. Note the ‘once’,” responded Lesley Thompson from Suffolk.
Cost of living crisis or not, Paul Rutherford’s son and son-in-law use “two teabags per mug, left to stew for at least 10 minutes and then drunk with the teabags in the mug”. The colour of these brews, he added, “has to be seen to be believed.”
At the other end of the scale, David Rumsey’s late uncle “might hold the record for the most mugs of tea from a single teabag”: while in captivity during the Second World War, he’d “reuse teabags until there was virtually no change in the colour of the water, then dry them and sell them”. Rumsey insists they were “popular”.
Milk first, or last? Mug or bone china? Teabag or loose-leaf? How much per person? Boiling water or just hot? Steeping for minutes, or for seconds? We in this country could hold referendums on each of those questions once a week.
What’s needed is an authority, somebody to strain the spent residue from this argument, leaving only the rich, hearty flavour of opinion. Some might have had enough of experts, but please respect the expert-teas of Angela Pryce, a consultant who’s worked with everybody from growers in the developing world to the buying team at Fortnum & Mason.
“FOUR CUPS?” she cries, when I inform her of Mr Blake’s firestarter. Thrifty it may be, but it’s also just terrible tea making. “There are about four actual rules when it comes to tea, and then there are other aspects I’m fluid about,” Pryce says.
Firstly, never reboil a kettle. “It’s very important to use freshly drawn cold water, because the chemical structure of the water – both the oxygen content and minerals – will be altered by reboiling, which will affect the taste and appearance. For the same reason, filter your water if it’s hard.” For black tea, water must be boiling. For green, no more than 80 Celsius, otherwise it’ll be bitter.
Got it. But before that, we need to know precisely how much tea is appropriate per person. “About 2-3g of tea per 200 ml water. Roughly, one teaspoon of tea per cup,” says Pryce. It means the old adage – as mentioned by Michael Whitlam in a letter this week – of “one teaspoon per person and one for the pot” is about right.
“That’s loose tea, but most teabags in the UK contain about 3.125g, so the adage works for bags in a pot, too,” Pryce says. “For a better flavour, use loose leaf. Teabags just give you strength.”
But four from one bag? “A no-no. That first brew is going to extract all of the colour and body from the tea.” Generally, Pryce says, we don’t brew our tea for long enough, and the rule is “the larger the leaf, the longer the brew” – five minutes for a pot of loose leaf, “two to three minutes is ideal for a teabag”. That’s the final rule: always remember to take the leaves or bag out.
Receptacle, sugar, and type of tea (there are over 3,000 kinds, go wild) are up to personal preference.
“I would say never put milk in first if you’ve got a teabag, because it cools down the water as soon as you pour it in,” Pryce says.
The upper class tradition of putting milk in first before pouring from a pot, she points out, may have come from a time when delicate bone china and porcelain was prone to cracking under naked attack from boiling water.
So there we have it. Surely nobody could disagree with a single aspect of that … could they?
