🫖 Tea/ Tee ☕

Enjoy your Tea

A teapot lets the leaves have space, gives a better extraction, although there are some high-tech tea bags promising the same.

What is Tea?

Tea is made from the plant Camellia sinensis using fresh or treated leaves. Rarely another species from the same genus may also be used. And that's it. Anything made from flowers, herbs berries etc is an infusion, also called a tisane. Once tisanes were made using barley water, but this meaning has more or less died out, although you may be able to get barley water in squash form in shops.
Anything else isn't tea, even if it may be marketed as such.

Black to White

Differences in sorts of tea has all to do with the degree of natural oxidation/ fermentation. Black is left the longest.

• Max- Black
• Partly- Oolong
• Not- Green, Yellow and White

Flavourings

THere are some traditional additives such as citrus. Earl Grey has Bergamot, as often do Turkish teas. Moroccan tea has mint in it. The rest is probably part marketing and part selling aromatised poorer quality tea at higher prices.

Keeping it Warm

In the British Isles, one tends to keep tea warm with a tea cosy, this example was knitted by someone at home and bought from a 'bring and buy sale'. There are lots of commercially available cosies to fit your decor. In Germany a little heated stove using a 'tea light', a sort of candle, tends to be more common.

The Water

The water should be fresh. Filling up a kettle once to the top, and boiling the water in it a number of times, using just a cupful each time, degrades the water, boiling out dissolved air which influences the taste. Apart from that it is a total waste of energy.

German people buy Scottish rather than English Breakfast Tea, just the name makes it romantically taste better. The English is blended specifically for hard water, the Scottish for soft. Soft water is generally bettr, and Water softeners can help, but the charcoal in canisters to take out 'chemicals' is finicky, it can just as easily return the impurities to the water, and bacteria can also multiply in the canisters.

Why Milk?

Milk removes the bitterness by binding with certain chemicals in the tea, That's why it should always go in first, at higher concentrations of milk relative to tea it works better, for those who say you don't know how much milk you need, judging the colour to add milk after, then just add a little milk first. In some parts of Germany, tea is drunk with cream and brown sugar, which is something the British reserve for coffee..