Here’s where I don my flat cap, pipe and begin to reminisce how things were better in my day. Alas, I’m a little old before my time, but I do love a nice cuppa. Although since I’ve moved to the south coast my tea making skills have been a little lack-lustre – what used to be the trademark Matt cup of tea has now turned into a generic mug of tea, coupled with some weird stuff at the bottom.
So how do you make the perfect cup of tea?
Famously, this bloke here – George Orwell – wrote an essay on this very subject for the Evening Standard in 1946. Man, I wish my essays were on that sort of subject…
His research concludes you should only use Indian or Ceylonese tea because it makes you feel “wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it”. None of that milk-less Chinese poppycock.
The only thing Chinese near your tea should be the teapot, which should be warmed prior to adding your six heaped spoons of loose tea, and if you’re older you’ll probably want more. You should then pour boiled water onto the leaves and stir it, or shake it if you’re feeling adventurous. You should then pour the cream your milk before pouring it into the teapot and then serve without sugar, unless you’re Russian, then you’re probably too pissed out your face to even care.
Although nobody should mess with the Orwell, his elitist thinking has spawned many studies by students looking for an easy path to a degree. Obviously, everyone’s opinions are different, so you should experiment and see what works for you… like you actually care…
You’ve got to take into consideration the ideas of Dr Andrew Stapley, a chemical engineer from Loughborough University, who has given us an up-to-date method of tea in the modern age.
You’ll only want a single spoon of tea leaves to get filtered out as you pour the tea from the teapot onto the milk awaiting it in the cup. If you add milk afterwards, the milk proteins open up and essentially die in a clump, giving it a nastier taste than the other way around.
But Stapley isn’t fighting with Orwell. He agrees Assam tea – essentially Indian tea – should be used, but that’s because of his own preference. Sugar can or cannot be added, though, depending whether you like it sweet or not (urm, thanks Captain Obvious).
But as a student, I don’t have the patience to go through a teapot. Straight to cup for the win. Okay, it’s never going to be brilliant, but one way to make tea better is to make it stronger, from my point of view. Leave the teabag in the tea while you make other things, such as toast in the morning, and take it out just as you go to drink it. Don’t forget to keep stirring and strain the teabag at the end. White, two sugars, sorted.
Problem is, the south of England is notoriously the area with the hardest water of the UK (and we as a nation are already pretty hard – water, and muscle - anyway) so unless you descale your kettle more often than John Terry plays away, you’re going to end up with nasty bits at the bottom of your cup. Descale your kettle, or boil water in a pan, as just-boiled water is the softest, and a pan is easier to clean, obviously.
So that’s what it boils down to. A cup full of luke-warm puns I’ve tea-leafed from other websites. Oh, and the perfect cuppa. Anyone fancy one?
I miss my Matt having a cup of tea ready & waiting when I get in from work!!! x