El Reg rocket squad poised to select Ultimate Cuppa teabag Vulture Central's pursuit of the ultimate cuppa is set to enter the final straight as we prepare to decide once and for all what constitutes the pinnacle of cha perfection. Mug with our Vulture logo Followers of our resolutely no-IT-angle-whatsoever path to tea heaven will be aware that we've already established a brewing …
From memory, Peña Negr is pretty high up - can we assume that the brewing and testing will be taking place at a more appropriate altitude than 2000m? ISTR the boiling point of water being only around 93 degrees centigrade at 2000m which, I'm sure you'll all agree, is completely insufficient for this analysis. :)
Tea's up!
For standard tea - that is the way to go. From a pot. When not drinking Earl Grey, this should be the de facto standard.
The main variable here, though, is the hardness of water. Softer water makes, to my mind, a nicer brew by far. So at least use a Brita style filter to help things along.
I was with you right until you revealed that your drink of choice is actually pot porri!
PG Tips, Tetley and the usual all need to go on the list, though I'd also recommend adding Twinings 1706 [I think] strong breakfast to the test. Tesco red label and Co-Op brands are inferior, but also worth a mention in dispatches as worthy unbranded alternatives.
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Furthermore I suggest thet anyone who puts forward any of those fruit / spice flavoured or night-time / relax abominations, earl grey or anything to do with liptons should be banned from commenting for a very long time.
Never had a good cup of Turkish tea (basically, bits of bush swirled around in a cup) or Chai, then.
If I have to use tea bags I go for this one, because the Keemun black tea it contains does not turn bitter when you forget to remove it from the mug.
I tend not to use milk, ever since my student days, when the question "how many lumps" could accurately be used for the amount of milk, from time to time.
tea....
Good, strong, rich in tannin....
Not like the watery dishwater some of the competitors tea tastes like... Even a quick dunking will result in a moderately decent brew. Best tea bags for the "we dont make tea" brigade who deliberately fuck up the seemingly simple act of brewing a cuppa to ensure they are never asked to mash again.
For an office (not home where you can take time etc.), Twinings Everyday won it's place in our office (being honest, it's up to me as the only boss who cares about Tea). We broke the emergency seal on the PG the other week and productivity suffered...
I'd have thought the good folks at Yorkshire Tea would have sent the Hard Water version to the Reg - a scientifically designed variant indeed.
Seconded. (And surely none of the horrible Everyday Blended stuff)
Although, with milk I prefer the stronger Twinings Assam.
Whichever, it really has to be the one sold in the UK. I don't know what the difference is besides the size of the teabags but the shitty little teabags Twinings sells on the continent do in no way compare to the ones I bring over from the UK.
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I'm often called a tea snob by my mum, who thinks the ultimate cup of tea is the filth in a bag known as Sainsbury's Red Label. This devil's juice is about a quid for a landfill's worth of tea bags and the taste is probably something similar to the tea I've been reading about in Metro 2033: tea created by the mushrooms grown on the Moscow subway system 30 years after a nuclear war.
For me the ultimate has to be Twining's English Breakfast Tea. Don't let the name put you off: this is truly an all day affair. Rich, golden in colour and thoroughly satisfying, it's the tea that tea would drink itself. Assuming of course that tea is sentient and not a cannibal.
I'm not fussy about my tea, I'll drink most any brand, and take it anywhere from black with three sugars to white with none, but I Will Not Drink Sainsburies Red box tea, it tastes bloody vile.
Even decaff tea tastes better.
Also, relevant video is relevant (and entirely safe for work)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eELH0ivexKA
I used to like Yorkshire Gold but found a few years ago that it (and others to be fair) seemed to have reduced in strength. So I've been moving around trying to find what satisfies me.
I settled on "Murroughs Welsh Brew" - consistent and a decent strength.
But there is a serious point, already mentioned : the union of blend and water type is crucial. As Murroughs puts it :
The special blend of African and Indian teas have been specifically chosen to perfectly compliment the waters of Wales (needed a bit of proof-reading there, I think)
So any test that doesn't marry the blend and the water of its devotees will surely mislead?
On mission to London last week, I brought half a suitcase of tea back here to southern Europe; natch lotsof Yorkshire Gold but I did also pickup a packet of Fortnum & Mason Green Earl Grey tea bags (steamed not fermented they claim) This could work well at altitude as the "1867 Oilmen to their Royal Highnesses Prince and Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein" suggest to "Brew with water heated to 80°C for a couple of minutes"
The correct colour at drinking point is given in this image http://www.fortnumandmason.com/images/product/large/2002721_3.jpg
Yes, yes, y'all. 27p and cheap at half the price. "Blended and tasted by experts", donchyaknow, and coming with the following instructions:
How to make the perfect cup of tea: 1. To enjoy this tea at its best, always warm the teapot first with boiling water. 2. Use one tea bag per person and one for the teapot. 3. Pour on boiling water and leave the tea to stand for 4-5 minutes to allow the full flavour to brew. 4. Serve with or without milk.
Hard to argue with any of that, except maybe, just possibly, the presumption that using said raw materials will result in the perfect cup of tea.
Bless 'em.
(Source: http://www.tesco.com/groceries/Product/Details/?id=258290317)
Milk ruins a good cuppa, the flavour is lost under the sweet milk.
Tea without milk is a completely different drink, much more delicate and softer.
For those who have not tried it: you need a good tea (not a supermarket own label), don't brew it long.
The only downside is the residue left on the side of the mug, a small price to pay.
I've always been a PG Tips drinker, of course these days it's the pyramid bags. but that's likely as much through habbit as anything else, but folks always bought PG Tips so its the brand i buy too.
not sure if i've tried Yorkshire Gold though, i shall give is a go.
the missus had a funny turn and decided she wanted lots of fruit teas, so we spent a small fortune ordering a bunch of weird flavours from Twinings for her. i snuck a selection box of their more normal teas (Earl Grey, Prince of Wales, Breakfast, etc etc) and while they were nice, for a change, the most refreshing and revitalising cuppa in the morning or the end of the day was from a humble PG Tips.
Plus, when i were a lad, they had the adverts with the chimps. and now, they have adverts with Johnny Vegas and a monkey. you gotta give them points for consistency over the years :)
I get very panicy and think everything is going to go wrong. avoid caffeine and I am fine
As Pratchett has observed in the past (with reference to coffe, rather than tea), the phenomenon you have encountered is called being 'knurd'... experiencing life as it really is without all the comfortable fluffy delusions your brain erects to make things bearable.
And besides, everything has already gone wrong. It is just getting worse, now.
I too was raised on Co-Op 99 loose leaf tea, and my dear old Mum still uses it. Yummy stuff.
Nowadays, my personal preference is Tetley, with Taylor's YT a close second. The water down here in the far south east is as hard as diamonds, but I didn't like the taste of their "Hard water" stuff. The YT Gold Rwandan was quite nice, but not often spotted in the wild, at least not round these 'ere parts...
Should I move back to Yorkshire, or Rwanda?
I don't know WHAT they put in that tea, but they must put something - because since I tried that tea, every other one taste like hay, honestly :(
it's got another benefit, which probably only appeals to freaks like me: one teabag goes a very long way, and by "a long way" I mean a one litre thermos flask of strong tea off one bag. No milk, thank you, just... sugar. And half a slice of lemon (sorry, like I said, a freak). And if you wonder what the (..) would you need a 1 litre flask of tea for, well. There are places, where "it could save your life", and other places - where it could save your life too.
It is my belief that there can be no single 'best'; you can only have the tea which tastes best for the other ingredients used and, as the prime ingredient is water, that will vary regionally.
I'm a PG Tips man, like it stewed, so I thought I'd like Yorkshire's tannin but found I hated the flavour.
Worst tea ever must be the flavourless slop that Burger King serve up. That does Tetley no favour at all.
what it is they put into the paper or plastic cups that sucks the flavour out of tea?
eg on a train, there's a Twinings Breakfast tea bag (a reasonable brand), you leave it in the cup for hours, fish it out with that wooden stick and it tastes of nothing. Sucking on the stick wihout paying £2 would have given more refreshment.
Personally I am PG Tips man all the way, but as long as the brew has a strong Ceylon element I am happy. "British" tea (and all the major British brands) have had a strong Ceylon element in the blend, ever since Thomas Lipton popularised the stuff, way back when.
Only things I really can't stand are Sainsbury's Red Label (shouldn't be legal to call that tea) and Earl Gray (Victorian Con Trick).
Yorkshire Gold Rowandan is the best bag on the market. I must confess that they rarely get used though, as when at home I use a Tea pig with a loose leaf mix of Assam and Lapsang (about 5 to 1 ratio). Both pig and mug filled with water straight off the boil. After 10 seconds the pig is emptied then filled with payload of Tea then water out of the same kettle WITHOUT REBOILING. 6 minutes with a gentle stir at 2, A dash of full fat milk until the tea becomes opaque rewards me with (in my tatses) a perfect brew that cannot be matched.
Unfortunatley, this dabbling has forced me to shun the more ghetto mainstream efforts of using a bag as it all tastes like hogwash in comparason. This has had the terrible consequence of me abandoning Tea at work in favor of a coffee percolator (for which I grind beans for the day freshly every morning) as I simply cannot take the pig to work as the time and faffing involed is simply not workable, also I'm IT operations for a global materials technology firm and if the workshop lads saw me with that I would be lynched!
Cheap teabags are a false economy, if you take into account the time taken from consumption to ..... erm, "exit".
PG Tips tea just stays drunk for longer. And can usually be had on promotion; 160 bags for £3, 240 for £4 or the jackpot: 160 + another 160 free for £5, at one or other of the supermarkets.
Thought i'd share this with you all. True story on radio Aire from about 25 years ago.
Its a phone in quiz show and the lady on the phone is asked by the presenter " What is another commonly used term for making a pot of tea ?"
After several wrong answers she asks for a clue.
Presenter " The Jewish language"
After a long pause and a few mutterings,
"Mashit" she said.
I was driving at the time, nearly passed out laughing.
Lester,
Your basic design is flawed. The Royal Society of Chemistry posted the correct way to make a perfect cup of tea 10 years ago Link to PDF - This was done at the time of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Eric Blair (George Orwell), who wrote a set of rules for making a nice cup of tea in 1946.
If neither of the above suits, try ISO 1303, which specifies a standardized method for making tea.
Generally I drink Tetleys but when I can get it here I buy Taylors YT but Barrys Irish is as good as Taylors in my opinion.
Earl Gay (not a typo) is not and never has been tea just like everything Liptons turn out.
Twinings Red Breakfast tea is doable if you put two bags in a cup and PG Tips doesn't seem to travel whenever I drink it here in Spain it only seems to have half the flavour of Tetleys.
One infusion that can compete with tea is Rooiboos (Red Bush) from South Africa either plain or flavoured with cinnamon.
In response to the 1 litre flask comment , how could any self respecting tea drinker consider 1 litre of tea as 'a lot' ? I won't consider buying a flask for tea that is less than a litre.
Just so you spoilt buggers in the UK know, A pack of 40 Tetleys tea bags cost €2.08 here.
The blenders used to blend tea to suit various parts of the country. It sounds like you've got Tetleys suited for hard water and PG for soft. Try making both after using a water filter and then compare, I've always found Tetleys distinctly lacking in taste even when using soft water.
PG Tips here - I prefer the dry Assam taste over classic builder's brew. Yorkshire tea is also good and I'll have to give the hard water blend a try next time I can pick some up. The water here next to the Rhine is hard as fuck: great for beer, shit for tea, filter is essential and you have to stop the Jormans giving you luke warm water with a teabag and condensed milk.
Twinings Assam gets my vote- a robust flavour means you don't need to brew it for ages and get that bitter, grainy stew that comes from overbrewing a lesser teabag. Ceylon for a slightly milder flavour comes in a close second followed by PG tips for an everyday cuppa.
Fun fact about pyramid bags, they have been shown to produce a discernibly better flavour but only if you open the bag out into a proper tetrahedron shape before brewing. Further research into the morphology of tea enclosures clearly required...
I like it. Sometimes I go crazy and put two bags into one big cup of joy.
I do use sugar.
I do use a spot of milk.
And I'm lazy, so I rarely take the bag out of the cup.
I guess you can tell from the above, I'm American.
My grandmother used to make me the perfect tea and buttered toast when I was 10. Loved it.
No, not the poison known as coffee! Cafedirect does tea, too (used to be called Tea Direct), and it's the only stuff I buy. Tastes extremely good after being left in the cup for 5+ minutes.
Here in Northern Ireland we have Punjana/Thompson teas, the packaging of which claims that other teas are all stalk and no leaf. I don't know if that's true or not, but to me Punjana is just dust and seems to give me a cough if I drink too much (I don't know how that works either!).
Barry's tea is good, too.
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