The Tea Thread
- Thread starter oll_lewis
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Min Bannister
Possessed dog
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I've got a similar one. Broke the lid ages ago unfortunately( it was a china lid that fitted my mug). It's great.
Floyd
Antediluvian
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I don't use the lid (metal).
Now we buy better quality tea, I can get two, or sometimes three cups out of the same batch of tea. Just needs leaving in a bit longer.
kesavaross
Justified & Ancient
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That brings up a good question to which I think there's no set answer.
What's the optimum time to leave a tea bag in the cup?
Sharon Hill
Complicated biological machine
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It depends on how hot the water is and the type of tea. If I have a standard black tea bag with boiling water, 3 minutes is perfect, anything beyond 4 min gets bitter. But if I get restaurant water, which is not hot enough, I don’t ever have to remove the bag.
AnonyJ
Captainess Sensible
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Oh yes! I highly recommend them, you can get a decent cup of ground coffee out of them too.
For those of us in the specialised centre of the Venn diagram below
View attachment 68326
I can recommend stainless steel fine mesh cup filters to replace tea bags. I was totally fed up of picking out bits of wispy paper-plastic
remnants of tea bags from my garden soil so got some of these which works very well with any kind of loose tea:
brownmane
off kilter
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Also, it's according to taste. If I have a cup of green tea, I might leave it steeping for less time. I don't like the tannin in teas.
White tea, if I treated myself, I would leave in longer because it doesn't get bitter as quickly.
Rooibos tea I can leave the leaves in and it never gets bitter. It, of course is not true tea, but is nice.
kesavaross
Justified & Ancient
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When I worked on the railways I alway drank Rooibos tea for the very reason. I could put a teabag in the flask, fill it with hot water and off I'd go.
brownmane
off kilter
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I also have a small iron teapot and I love it.
brownmane
off kilter
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Thanks for that word. I'll have to see if mine really is one or the enameled one that you cannot boil water in. It is probably enameled because it has the strainer.
If it is only cast iron, I had never thought of boiling the water in it because anything we call a teapot cannot be used to boil water.
I found a link that explains the difference between a cast iron only and an enameled type of Japanese tea pots.
https://japanobjects.com/features/tetsubin
brownmane
off kilter
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That's why I originally thought mine was entirely cast iron, because it would rust if left wet.
ramonmercado
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The Torrid Tale of Tea: how it fueled the expansion of an Empire.
The seed from which this story begins is that of the tea bush (Camellia sinensis), which produces most of the world’s tea.
The oldest tea leaves go back 2,150 years and were found in the tomb of China’s Jia Ding Emperor. Beginning as an elite practice, tea drinking advanced quickly through China and became widespread by the early middle ages.
Chinese tea is said to have been introduced to England by the wife of King Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. The bride’s native country, Portugal, was the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean; its network of bases and colonies included Macao, in southern China, which was leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by the ruling Ming dynasty. By 1662, when Catherine of Braganza’s marriage was celebrated, the Ming were in the last stages of their overthrow by the Qing dynasty, but the status of Macao remained unchanged.
This meant that at the time of the wedding, Portugal had been consuming Chinese products for over a century, so the practice of tea drinking was already well- established among the country’s upper classes. In her dowry, Catherine brought with her two things that would prove to be of world-historical importance: a casket of tea and a set of six small islands that would later become Bombay (now Mumbai).
Tea drinking caught on quickly in England, and by the early eighteenth century, even before Britain established its empire in India, Chinese tea was already an important article of trade for the British economy. In the decades that followed, the value of Chinese tea for the British increased even faster.
Throughout the eighteenth century, even as the British were conquering immense swaths of territory in North America and the Indian subcontinent, Chinese tea remained the British East India Company’s prime source of revenue, much of which was used to finance British colonial expansion: “During the eighteenth century,” writes the historian Erika Rappaport, “tea paid for war, but war also paid for tea.” By the late eighteenth century, tea “had become so much the national drink that the Company was required by Act of Parliament to keep a year’s supply always in stock.” ...
https://lithub.com/steeped-in-war-a...how-tea-funded-the-british-empires-expansion/
The seed from which this story begins is that of the tea bush (Camellia sinensis), which produces most of the world’s tea.
The oldest tea leaves go back 2,150 years and were found in the tomb of China’s Jia Ding Emperor. Beginning as an elite practice, tea drinking advanced quickly through China and became widespread by the early middle ages.
Chinese tea is said to have been introduced to England by the wife of King Charles II, Catherine of Braganza. The bride’s native country, Portugal, was the first European nation to enter the Indian Ocean; its network of bases and colonies included Macao, in southern China, which was leased to the Portuguese in 1557 by the ruling Ming dynasty. By 1662, when Catherine of Braganza’s marriage was celebrated, the Ming were in the last stages of their overthrow by the Qing dynasty, but the status of Macao remained unchanged.
This meant that at the time of the wedding, Portugal had been consuming Chinese products for over a century, so the practice of tea drinking was already well- established among the country’s upper classes. In her dowry, Catherine brought with her two things that would prove to be of world-historical importance: a casket of tea and a set of six small islands that would later become Bombay (now Mumbai).
Tea drinking caught on quickly in England, and by the early eighteenth century, even before Britain established its empire in India, Chinese tea was already an important article of trade for the British economy. In the decades that followed, the value of Chinese tea for the British increased even faster.
Throughout the eighteenth century, even as the British were conquering immense swaths of territory in North America and the Indian subcontinent, Chinese tea remained the British East India Company’s prime source of revenue, much of which was used to finance British colonial expansion: “During the eighteenth century,” writes the historian Erika Rappaport, “tea paid for war, but war also paid for tea.” By the late eighteenth century, tea “had become so much the national drink that the Company was required by Act of Parliament to keep a year’s supply always in stock.” ...
https://lithub.com/steeped-in-war-a...how-tea-funded-the-british-empires-expansion/
escargot
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