f13.net

The TL;DR:  Get a tea robot.

The boring long edition:

So I like tea.  Except I don't like 'microwave a mug of water and stick a teabag in it' tea, which always winds up crappy when I try to make it.  And I'm too goddamned lazy to stand over a teapot with a thermometer and timer to steep tea X at temperature Y for time Z.  This has resulted in my not drinking hot teas for years.  Since I'm one of those people who loves the smell of coffee beans but can't stand the horrible taste of the finished product, I've mostly wound up drinking water lately.  Thanks, diabeetus!  Well I shouldn't have been drinking that much soda anyhow, even if it wasn't trying to kill me.  There were some places in town that served a decent selection of teas with meals, but they're pretty few and far between.

But anyways, I'm visiting a friend up in the DC area, and he starts whipping out some fantastic tea from a pitcher.  I am incredulous at this, as he is a lazy bum much like me, and all of a sudden he's waving around cans of loose tea like some wizard brewing potions.  I'm getting really suspicious that he might be a doppelganger right up until I learn that he isn't actually doing anything, the tea pitcher has a magnetic basket thing inside that dunks the tea leaves in the water for a set amount of time while the base heats the water to a set temperature.  He was just dumping tea in the basket and hitting the button for the type of tea and it was making the tea for him.  It was a robot.  That made tea.  HOLY FUCK.

I've always considered it unfair that any coffee-drinking idiot could get a coffee machine for twenty bucks, but there's no tea machine that works worth a damn.  Only now there is.  And it's immensely expensive.  DC buddy apparently shelled out two hundred and fifty for it.  But he's a database engineer who makes insane cash, so it doesn't matter much.  And in fairness, one of my coffee-addict friends says that she put down over a grand for an espresso machine, and seemed to believe that it wasn't a wasted purchase even after confirming to me that the machine wasn't giving her blowjobs.  So to each their own, I guess.

I probably could've gone my whole life without a tea robot until I find out that bed bath and beyond carries them.  And I had like a solid pound of those 20% off coupons they keep stuffing into my mailbox.  All of a sudden it became a $200 tea robot.  That's when the sweating began.  I mention this to a friend in passing, and they say, "Oh hey, my brother works in one of those kitchen stores, he got one for like a hundred seventy last month."  Two days later I have a tea robot and hopefully he isn't being fired for abusing his employee discount.

Thus armed like a toddler with a pistol, I decide to embark upon my journey into the tea world I'd been missing for years.  I have a rough idea of the teas I like, but not the super-specific blend names, so I start poking around for tea stores.  Google pops up a Teavana in the yuppie mall, but it has bad reviews about salespeople trying hard to sell customers shit they don't want.  I idly put in a search about the company, and find a 500-post thread full of hair-curling stories about the employees being abused and customers being ripped-off. (http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=7509)   :ye_gods:  Ooohkay, so hey look there's a locally-owned tea store in the other end of town.  That sounds like a much more sane place to shop at.

I walk into the store, and there's a big binder on the counter with 'Health Benefits' on it.  Now I realize that a store owner should take whatever good sales tactic that presents itself, but I've always been really leery of herbal health benefits, given that for every study that says that an herb makes you immortal, there's another study that says it gives you cancer.  I've never once thought that I was doing my health any favors by drinking tea, I'm just in it for the flavor.  And in that regard, I'm pretty lost.  The lady there didn't try to hard sell me anything, but that's mostly because she didn't say anything.  She seemed nice enough, I'm sure if I'd started asking for advice she would have given it, but I didn't have a lot of time to stand around interrogating the tea lady, so I went with the safest bet and picked a black masala vanilla chai mix.  I'd never had theirs, but I hadn't ever encountered a chai tea I didn't like, so I felt pretty... five bucks an ounce?  I was tempted, briefly, to ask whether 'tea' was actually a euphemism for some other leafy product of less legal standing, as I was worried that using the tea robot to steep marijuana would void the warranty.  The couple of ounces I bought amounted to a larger bag of tea than I'd been expecting, though, so it wasn't so bad as I'd first feared.  They said that an ounce of tea made about fifteen cups; I haven't made enough yet to know how accurate that statement is.

I take the tea home, toss it in the machine, fire it up, and get my very own $190 cup of tea a few minutes later.  Even though it's traditional, I don't add the milk and sugar at first to the chai, drinking it straight.  After all, if you dump enough milk and sugar (or milk and stevia in my case, thanks again Wilford Brimley!) in a drink it doesn't matter how crappy the tea was, it'll come out pretty good.  I go through a couple of cups to satisfy myself that I'm not feeling stupid for putting down that much cash for a tea robot, then fire up the milk and stevia for the more desserty variety of chai.  In order to make the most of the not-cheap tea, I make three pots worth from one batch of leaves, with the second and third pots set to a longer steeping time to keep the flavor constant.  On the upside, lots of tea.  On the downside that makes me unwilling to start a fresh batch of tea later in the evening, as the leaves are 'wasted' if I don't get more pots out of them.  I've just started making the first batch when I get home from work; it's easy to find opportunities to make the other two batches as the evening progresses, especially if guests come by, the tea-guzzling bastards.  I'm already mildly concerned that some of my friends may have me killed to get the tea robot.  But at least now I'm under $10 per cup of tea, with the price dropping more with each batch.

The problem I'm running across now is the lack of a cheap test run for tea.  It takes a few grams of tea to make a pot.  But people selling tea don't seem to want to sell anything less than two ounces, so if the tea turns out to be crap you have a fair pile of unused tea that you don't like.  I've wound up swapping samples of tea with various tea drinking friends to try to get around the problem, and a couple of online tea stores sell sampler packs with smaller quantities of multiple teas, but it's a mildly annoying degree of effort when what I'd like to do is walk into the tea store and just buy a sack containing a scoop of each of their teas so I can run them all through the tea robot over a weekend and quickly work out which ones I like the best.  Additionally, I'm nerding out to a degree that one of my roommates came into the kitchen to find me measuring the grams of loose tea to put into the robot.  I endeavored to explain to him that the little scoop with the tea robot was an inaccurate system and that different teas were packed to different densities so measuring by volume was flawed compared to measuring by weight.  This just made me look more insane, I'm pretty certain.

So the end result is that I have hot tea again after forever, and it's very good hot tea thus far.  Haven't run across any samples that I've disliked yet, so that's a promising sign at least.  People with money to burn who like teas might be interested to know that there are actual decent tea makers on the market now, so I decided to share with the class.

It would've helped if you linked to this fucking tea robot :oh_i_see:

I'm assuming this is what (http://www.amazon.com/The-Breville-One-Touch-Tea-Maker/dp/B003LNOPSG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330078483&sr=8-1&tag=f13-20) you are referring to.

I bought an electric kettle with a thermometer built in for like 30 bucks. Even has little "zones" for each tea type.

Works great for making my decaf green tea in the mornings (which I need to go do now!)

Most tea stores around here also brew individual cups and you can see whether or not you like a particular tea that way.

Are you me?

I love hot tea as well and right now just rely on the Keurig we got a few months ago.  I also tend to use the cups twice when I'm on a tea kick, just because they are expensive.  Not sure I'd ever go for a tea robot though. I would like to get more into trying different blends of loose tea and will eventually buy a "make your own" cup for the Keurig (WTF $24 for that Kohls?!?) so I can experiment.  There is a local tea shop in a nearby town that I'd go to (mostly because the owner is a customer at the husband's bank) but he's stopped in to get me gifts there and says it looks like a place I'd love.

(http://www.pamperedkitchenchefaid.com/site/745900/uploaded/cordless-electric-tea-kettle/cordless-electric-tea-kettle-awk101-200.jpg)

I've had something like this for a few years.  These have been around forever.  My wife and I drink tea all the time.  Except that this just heats up the water for you and doesn't make a whole pot of tea.  It's better imo so you can make 1 cups worth or 4.  Fill with water, press a button.  Done.

Yeah, that's the one, Trippy.  I found another one that retails for 125, but it doesn't raise and lower the basket on its own; it just has a timer that beeps to let you know to pull the basket up yourself.  Which rather defeats the whole "push buttan and walk away, come back later for tea" thing, but saves a noticeable bit of money if you don't mind having to stand over it while it works.
Link. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B005RRBI9I)

Seems pricey.  The electric tea kettles cost $30.

Does a french press work well for tea?  I have one but I have never tried it out on tea.

Yeah, that's why I didn't get the cheaper one; it's essentially an electric kettle with a timer on it, you still have to dip the tea yourself.  The more expensive one is also an electric kettle, but one that maintains a temperature that you specify while dunking the tea itself, so it can run unattended.

I have an electric kettle. I have an infuser teapot. I add water to kettle, press butan. Sooner or later, water is ready. I hear butan go "snap." I pour water into teapot with loaded infuser basket. I set a timer. To do so, I push three butans. Timer beeps, I pour and enjoy tea.

I'm not seeing how this is such a complex and time-consuming process.

$5 an ounce?

I'm glad I just like Luzianne.

F13 needs an :effort: tag for me to use to convey precisely how lazy I am.  And all of the kettles I've seen before the new ones mentioned in the thread had one setting: hot.  Both the tea robot and the cheaper kettle have thermometers to maintain the temperature at the level that tea snobs claim are the best for whichever tea you're making.  I've seen some teas steep at 175, others as high as 212.  I can't say whether the precise temperature makes a huge difference; some of the people who insist it does also say they "age" their tea water in a special cistern or filter it through silver before making tea with it, so their opinions may be a bit suspect.  :oh_i_see:

I steep tea at "hot" and don't give a damn about the temp, but I've not fallen into snob territory.

Some of the organic compounds responsible for the flavour of tea will boil off at low temperatures, or won't steep out of the plant until it reaches a high temperature, or may change in chemistry if exposed to proper heat.  That (somewhat) checks out.

Without knowing the details the cistern might have some effect.  Maybe there's some particularly delicious mineral in the cistern wall?

Filtering it through silver is new age mysticism bullshit.  People have used silver in tableware for a long-ass time, but it's because it doesn't taste like iron or copper, not because it imparts any special properties, and presumably it doesn't come in contact with the water for long enough to impart any chemical change on the water.

The length of time it takes to steep tea "correctly" is just long enough to make me bored while I'm waiting for it to happen but just short enough that I can't go do something else.  Perfect sort of thing to automate.

Usually I solve this problem by just drinking milder teas that don't suffer too much when you wander off and let them steep for half an hour.   :awesome_for_real:  A tea robot might expand my horizons a bit.

If it involved actual effort on my part, I'd ignore the temp too.  The level of tea snobbery that involves some poor idiot hovering over a $500 Japanese iron tea pot with a thermometer in his hand is well above and beyond what I'm going to go through for a cup of tea, or any drink for that matter.  People in that tea forum linked to in my first post were unironically discussing methods of putting pots inside other pots of heated water to achieve and maintain the proper temperature.  That... is maybe a bit insane.  Sure, I have a water filter on my kitchen tap and make the tea with the filtered water, but that's the extent of my effort, and only then because my unfiltered tap water's a little gross-tasting.  When you see someone buying cases of spring water for making their tea, you're looking at someone who's gone past the point at which they should have stopped and reexamined their priorities in life.

Oh yeah, water temp. I tend to drink Puerh teas, which are steeped at 212. When I make a green tea or white or whatever else that takes 185ish, I tend to either a) kill the tea kettle before a full boil or b) toss an ice cube into the water. The second method is endorsed by a rep from Rishi teas, which is the snooty yet awesome tea brand in my area.

In other news, I can now show this post to my wife, who will once and for all not be able to call me lazy.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, hated chem class in college, still hate it now. No thanks. Boil water, insert tea bag, let stand till I remember it, add sugar, drink.

Anyone with experience with online tea shops?

Some friends spoke well of Adagio and bought me a couple of their tea samplers.  I haven't had the chance to try the tea for myself yet so can't give my own opinion.

On a side note, while browsing in my local tea store a few days ago I ran across a tea named Iron Goddess of Mercy.  That's apparently an actual official tea name and not something they just made up after binging on old kung fu movies.  I was compelled to purchase it, because frankly who would dare to pass it by?  I drank it, expecting to have red light go shooting out of my eyes or something as a result, but it was actually a very mild tea (which isn't a big surprise for an oolong) and thus far I haven't noticed any new super powers.  But I'll keep people posted in case evil monks come crashing through my windows and I have to fight them all.

Some people put too much effort into making tea.  You're like the people I hear in Starbucks saying "Venti Triple Espresso 110 degrees, 3.5 sugars, 1 blahblahlah"

Fuck that.

Heathen.

I'm a bit more manual.

For tea, I use a french Press and a 2 cup Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave to heat the water.  With a $20 infrared thermometer from Newegg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16896268001) and a bit of trial and error, I've discovered that 2c of water hits the correct temperature for green teas in 2:45 in my microwave, while making coffee with the AeroPress (http://www.amazon.com/Aerobie-AeroPress-Coffee-Espresso-Maker/dp/B0047BIWSK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330119103&sr=8-1) or the french press requires 3:10.  Added bonus is that the IR thermometer is handy for all sorts of things.

Countertop hot water dispenser 4 life.  :heart:

http://www.amazon.com/Tiger-PDH-B30U-Dispenser-Kettle-Capacity/dp/B0001WDFKO

This is our second model after the low-quality brand first one got kinda rusty inside (a $30 one from a chinese grocery store.... it lasted a year though, that was $30 worth).  It took a week or so for the weird plastic/oil/mystery smell from the factory for this one to go away but it's been fine once it got going.  Always having near-boiling water available is something you rapidly get used to for all sorts of random stuff like ramen.

Loose tea is either put a tea ball thing directly in the mug pulled out after the steeping, or if I'm making ice tea, in a pyrex cup which is then strained into my plastic cup o' ice.

We technically get tea from a local store, but as he has some pretty rigid hours, we often just mail-order it from the guy and throw the USPS some work (also his packing is hilariously overdone with bags and boxes and peanuts): http://www.teafountain.com/

I do not like flavored teas at all, so I don't know how "tasty" those are (I also don't put milk or sugar in my tea, blecch).  My favorite from teafountain is the Russian Superior #2 Blend which is a high-caffeine mix of different leaves. I'm not really a green tea fan so I've not had many of those, but I've tried the majority of his black teas and settled in with the Russian one after a few years.  

I do also really like one of his Darjeeling black teas (2004 Organic Prime India Black Tea DARJEELING 2011 FTGFOP1 Makaibari Estate) for an afternoon snack with toast or something.  I pretend I'm not a tea snob, but I think at this point I probably am.

Ha, geek.  That's an awesomely nerdy way to make drinks.  You just need to find some way to involve some beakers and glass tubes.

Yeah, I also got one of those infrared thermometers a while back (from Fry's I think) and they are, like, WAY more useful than you would think for all sorts of random stuff.  Microwave some leftovers or a box of restaurant rice or some random gooey thing and not sure if it's hot enough to eat?  Bam, thermometer says its 140, it's hot enough.  It's 180?  That'll burn your mouth, man, wait a few minutes.

How hot is it in here?  Shoot the wall with the thing.

I got my brother one for Christmas and he uses it to check to see if the bathwater for his kid is the right temperature.

It also doubles as a cat toy.

Actually, I would say it's less geeky than say spending $190 on a specialized machine to do it for him.

Once you measure with the thermometer once, and know the correct time setting for the microwave, you really don't need to ever do it again. I actually did this too with my microwave to figure when water was nearly boiling (although it wasn't for tea). It's like microwaving one bag of popcorn and noting how much time it took, so you can then set and forget for every next bag.

Until your microwave starts to lose it's sorcerous powers.

I wondered why you were talking about heating water in a microwave but from reading this thread I get the impression it's kind of unusual to own a kettle in the US? Weird.

Anyway you've convinced me I need a tea maker so I'm going to get myself one of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004MKML8S

Most Americans don't drink hot tea. The only tea they have ever had is iced.

The hot drink of choice for the U.S. is usually coffee. Pretty much everyone has a coffee pot of some sort.

Every home in Britain has a kettle. Not having one would be like not having a knife and fork in the house. This does mean that people tend to drink freeze dried instant coffee (just add hot water from the kettle) rather than decent coffee.

My wife's the tea drinker and orders from Adagio and enjoys their stuff, good service and prices according to her. She's got contraptions all over the house for tea but we don't yet have that Breville machine (or similar) Trippy linked up in the thread. I know how much I like my 1 button push expresso machine so I assume this is the same for a tea type, need to investigate further. You folks are good at spending my money without even knowing it.

My mother owned a kettle, but it was never used for tea.  I've never owned one, but I don't drink coffee, either (Diet Mountain Dew when I need a caffeine surge).  I don't think I've seen one outside of a housewares store since I was a child.

--Dave

English tea.

- One of those strange "kettle" things. I noticed on a search walmart did a whistling stovetop for $17 so can't be too uncommon, but I've seen the most Americans don't have a kettle thing before. I couldn't live without one, not just for tea either, how do you guys make instant sauces, soups and instant noodle/ramen?

- Water.
- 1 teabag of yorkshire tea.
- Sugar and milk

Teabag, 2 heaped spoons of sugar (adjust to taste) into a half pint mug. Pour boiling water (actively bubbling) into mug, hence a kettle and why a microwave/coffee machines are crap at making tea. Do something else for at least a minute, i'll happily leave it there 5 mins or more. Remove teabag and add milk, stir. Don't add milk before the water it's the brew is all about the water being as hot as possible. That's why the British of a certain generation have teapots which they warm first, and a bizarre selection of knitted teapot insulation accessories.

Teh Tarik (Malaysian tea)
Tea (as above), no sugar. Add condensed milk. Stir. Pour between two containers for a while, so it becomes aerated and cools down a bit. The higher the pour the better it is*. The old tea masters can throw it between two glasses like one of the squirty worm fountains you get at theme parks.

* Careful, you don't want to end up like Emil in Robocop.

Lianka and I have a staggering amount of tea. So I've been thinking about a special kettle for awhile, but need a BPA water cooler in terms of priorities first.  And I need to read the thread.

Derp: BPA free cooler.

This thread now has legs.

Since there is no watch and learn emoticon in the library, I will go with this:  :popcorn:

I already employ digital thermometers for home brewing. If an IR thermometer can help me with loads of other temping tasks AND help me perfect the boiling water w/ ice method, then so be it.

Any other tea prep methods are merely useful R&D for my own fun/slaking of thirst.

Do you mean BPA free?

I'll take that as the highest of compliments.  The funny thing is that both coffee and tea are faster and easier for me since I switched to my low-tech(French press/AeroPress + microwave) methods.  the AeroPress in particular has made it so that I can have fairly amazing coffee with no more than 5 mins total brew/cleanup time and the only waste being a paper towel and a highly compressed puck of pressed out coffee in the trash.

I admit that my coffee ritual also involves a $30 Costco burr grinder my brother got me a few Christmases ago.  :)  What I love most about my brewing setup is that the tools are either useful for other things or at least fit in a drawer and thus don't take up a ton of (very scarce) counter space.

If anyone wants to try out the AeroPress, you may want to pick up the Coava steel disk filter (http://coava.myshopify.com/collections/store/products/disk-coffee-filter), since it frees you from any recurring expense and lets the oils in your beans pass freely.

So you think you're better than me?

It was definitely a compliment.  Anything involving pyrex and infrared sensors gets bonus points in my book!  I loved chemistry and it shows in the kitchen in how much precision I strive for when mixing drinks or baking.  One of my roommates laughed at me once for reading a measuring cup like a graduated cylinder to make sure I was adding the right amount of water to a cake mix and I was all, "No fuck you, this is BAKING.  It is SCIENCE.  This isn't your wishy-washy Emeril bam! bullshit where you just throw whatever into a bowl and call it a day.  These proportions exist in the recipe for a goddamned reason."

I am a complete and utter coffee snob, but my wife is equally attuned to tea. A good place/brand I would recommend looking into is Mariage Freres. She imports a few ounces once in awhile and it is fantastic. Incredibly fragrant, and the leaves are whole and fresh, not all crushed and dusty like some other "fine" teas she has tried in the past. Sometimes you see it at places like Williams Sonoma, but importing it from their website you get a huge list of choices and it seems fresher (according to her). As for Teavana, I found they have a very good green tea. It smells and tastes like a bag of fresh lawn mower clippings, if you are into that kind of green tea. When steeped it almost looks like Mountain Dew it's so green.

It really should be milk before water. Water doesn't need to be that hot to start curdling milk.

When I went to india the fancy hotels had tea timers: three small hourglass timers of different length, for your different types of tea and preference.

Also microwaves are evil, why the hell would you heat water that way?

Wow. America is weird.

Boil kettle. Put teabag in mug. Pour boiling water on from kettle. Stir. Remove teabag, throw it in the compost bin (they compost great). Add milk. I probably drink 3-6 cups a day.

If you wanna get fancy you can use jug-filtered water and/or use fancy teabags. Twinings English Breakfast were nice but a couple of a years ago they changed something about them and they got really, really weak. We use Yorkshire Gold, lovely strong, brick-red tea.

I had no idea that having a kettle was a rarity in the US!

Because it's fast, 100% repeatable (as long as the volume of water remains the same each time) and free - it came with the apartment.  :)

This thread reminded me of an internet classic: Rip it, Dip it, Sip it! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxtRGEVsSOc)  (Warning, language not work safe.)

We took a group of scouts from Germany @ our AFB, to a camp near Sheffield, England, wow we stayed near the smaller town North of Sheffield and the local food and tea and beer/cider was incredible.  I wish I could brew some of how you all did, plus fresh food is awesome.  I'm not big on hot tea that is sweet or creamy, but the way you all had different types was great!.  I imagine that making a good strong tea is a fine line like making strong coffee, you want flavor and richness, not burnt and over saturated from too much beans/leaves.

It really is.  Some restaurants that serve tea really botch it in how burnt they make it.  It's strong, but MAN does it taste bad.  My ex was a tea expert and she used a French press and a nice kettle and all sorts of exotic types of tea, they always came out great.

Does boiling water in a microwave really make the water taste different than heated on a stove?

No boiling water in the microwave can cause the water to get too hot, and can not only cause issues with cooking or steeping tea, but can also be explosive.

Microwave cooking can ruin food because it over cooks, and water itself can become volatile if over-hot and you add sugar, cold liquid or other things to it. Tea is temperature sensitive so microwave water is something you have to get the timing perfect for a measure to become a specific degree, but as MisterNoisy said easily repeatable.

Only distilled water has volatility problems.

Nope not only distilled water, any water. Depends on conditions (http://www.snopes.com/science/microwave.asp), and also exaggeratedly over cooking, but yes it can happen with any water, any microwave, and is possible as a science experiement (http://www.chow.com/food-news/55123/can-microwaved-water-explode/). The FDA even has a warning about it (http://www.fda.gov/SiteIndex/ucm142506.htm).

I've never experimented, but the fact that water heated on a heating element is going crazy bubbly and water heated in a microwave is doing absolutely nothing makes it easy for me to believe that the non-microwaved water is better oxygenated.  And not in the stupid new agey 'the molecules are specially aligned' pseudoscience way, but in the sense that water that's been splashed around tastes better than water that's been sitting still.  If you put the microwave water into a thermos and gave it a good shake you'd probably get the same end result as the water you brought to a rolling boil on a stove.

The term for what happens when water is heated without boiling it is superheating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating). I doubt how you heat water affects it's oxygen content, when you microwave a substance you don't agitate the molecules, making it more difficult to change phase.

This is also why you should be careful when adding any powdered drink to microwaved water.

Only if the container isn't impervious to being microwaved - a ceramic mug or something should produce no difference at all.

Had some lamb in England a few years back. Was discussing how delicious it was with the tavernkeep and his comment was, "we've had a few extra hundred years to work on the recipe."

Rrrrgh, don't even get me started, in most of this country lamb is considered a "weird" meat and people haven't even tried it.

That's cause it tastes funky here.

Alton Brown - patron saint of food geeks - covered this in an episode of Good Eats.  Basically, microwaving water too long in a vessel without sufficient nucleation sites for bubbles to form (glass, etc.) results in nowhere for the excess energy to go - as soon as you either disturb it or add something to it, it all basically boils at one time explosively.  This can be avoided by either not heating it for too long or simply adding nucleation sites prior to turning the microwave on - he suggested simply dropping a wooden chopstick into the water before nuking.

Mmmmm.. Gyro.

I just did some browsing.  You're right with one caveat - distilled water is really fucking bad news because it's already been boiled once, which will tend to purge the dissolved gas from it.

Most molecular biologists will experience this regularly when making agarose gels for DNA/RNA separation. A common method of making them is to melt powdered agarose in an aqueous buffer in a conical flask in a microwave. When you take the flask out and swirl it around to mix the molten agarose in you regularly get a sudden boiling over as the layers of superheated liquid mix.

Many a newbie mol. bio. burns themselves doing this.

I grew up near an English family, so for me tea was always: preheat the pot, four teabags per pot, use the cozy, milk in the cup first (never cream).
They always looked at me funny though when I wouldn't heap sugar in to it - never liked any amount of sugar in my tea or coffee.

Now, it's English Breakfast tea (leaves from a local shop) in a tea ball, use the kettle to boil the water, steep the tea in the mug, add milk.

Local sushi shop does a green tea with brown rice that tastes amazing, but oddly the tea shop had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them about it.

That tea with rice is genmaicha.  I'd be a little surprised if a tea shop didn't carry any, maybe the person working the counter just didn't know it by the description of the contents.  Try again with the tea's name and you'll probably have better luck.

Cool, thanks.

As long as the water is not superheated, all water is at 100 C if it is boiling.  Low boil or fast, it makes no difference.

Stoves can superheat water as well, it's just less common than with microwaves.  Agitation or nucleation sites as mentioned are how you avoid this.  (Anyone remember boiling sticks in chem lab?)  Plus microwaves would actually cook the tea leaves if you heat a cup of water with a bag in it.

The point?  Boil your water, then add your tea.

There's another way to do it?


I'm so fucking confused by this thread. Boil Water, Add Bag, Profit?  :why_so_serious:

There is this way....

http://www.enema-web.com/green_tea_enema.htm (http://www.enema-web.com/green_tea_enema.htm)

1/2" tubing hooked up to the tea robot?

'It took the plastic surgeons a week just to remove the smile from his face'

Furiously just brought a new interpretation to the thread title.  :ye_gods:

Only a sea level. [the more you know]

Have ye no heard of teapots?

I just put water in my electric kettle, wait for it to be hot, pour in cup with teabag, and wait a couple minutes.

You all make me feel like I'm doing it wrong.   :ye_gods:

My mother dumped a grocery bag full of various loose teas on me today, saying that I could keep what I liked as long as I gave back any I didn't like.  Mom likes tea, but she's more for the convenience of tea bags and never fiddled much with loose teas, so she'd buy a tin of a loose tea, use some of it, then stick it on a shelf forever and never go back to it.  My research thus far is proving that the tea people were correct in saying that tea from 1995 is in fact not still good, even if it was sealed up the whole time.  None of it's been horrible, but it's very unremarkable and muted in flavor, leaving only the faintly bitter flavor of dried plant instead of the cinnamon cherry whatever that the tins claim it's supposed to taste like.  Which is a shame, 'cause there's pounds of the stuff.  I'm going to keep testing them in the off chance that at least one of the tins still has a good flavor, but I'm not feeling hugely hopeful.  I'm more hopeful that I can convince my mother to let me dump out the expired tea and keep the tins to put my own tea into.

I imagine tea is like coffee or other goods (beer, flour, vinegar, etc...) that once opened you have the exchange of oxygen on the goods to remove some of the flavor, it may be edible, but not taste very good. 

Doesn't everyone live at sea level?

It will, however, be consistent in the same location.  (Unless you want to get pedantic about high and low pressure systems and the tiny difference that would make, too. :-P)

:awesome_for_real:

This little tidbit aside, this thread is making me consider loose teas again. They are kind of a pain in the ass, but sound like they may be worth it.

Last night I had decaf, vanilla flavored tea, in the microwave. I thought that I should buy chemically flavored half-and-half, just to troll you bastards, but even I have some standards.

I'd imagine an emina would be a pain in the ass too.

Well played sir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3103

Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTDcWi1dzoM

Wow.

Ever since I cracked my stone tea kettle, I've just been lazy and make it in the Coffee maker.

On the previous responses, I've stopped drinking Twinnings, I could taste the difference with their Earl Grey, it seems they added more bergamot to cover the taste of the tea.  Usually my tea of choice is Alghazaleen both their Earl Grey and their Cardamom Gold.  As I have a Tea Kettle at work I usually drink Sencha and sometime Gyokuro there.

I bought Alghazaleens Earl Grey for a co-workers grand-daughter, she apparently loves the stuff and my co-workers (even those who can't or don't drink tea) love the Cardamom Gold.

I'm still cutting a swath through various tea samples.  The unfortunate thing is that it's difficult to have multiple teas back to back; if I toss out tea leaves after a single steep then they're more or less being wasted, so I only make one tea flavor in an evening.  What I might need to do is get some thermos bottles or something and store the batches of tea for later reheating so I can sample multiple teas in one sitting and get a better idea of which I like the most.

F13 just continues to amaze me with the wonderfully odd little discussion gems like this one that keep popping up!

I'm really a strong coffee lover at heart, like, Swedish or even Turkish strong, black and sweet.  I used to love to toss down Redeye's (coffee with a shot of espresso) at the local Borders back in the day. But now I'm down from 8-12 cups a day to 1 or 2 a year due to a whole host of reasons elliptically summarized by admitting that I'm now taking three blood pressure medications a day.  So, now I drink tea. No milk or whitener, thankyouverymuch, hot milk makes me barf.

To date, I'm primarily a bagger, being lazy and all.  (And that is as close as you will ever get to being able to label me a tea-bagger, lol).  I did have some nice teas in Australia many years ago, since the choice there was fine tea brewed on the spot or crap instant coffee usually served in a styrofoam cup.  But here and now since I've been forced to switch to tea I've gone the easy way out and used the bagged variety.  And I've tried just about everything the local grocery carries (and as it's the ONLY local grocery, that didn't take very long). I've discovered a total lack of interest in the various fruit and herb flavored varieties. With the surprising exception of Bigelow Green Tea with Mint which makes an awesome iced-tea.  I remember loving Earl Grey as a child but now it makes me gag. 

So anyway I worked my way through the basic options.  Lipton was meh.  Luzianne was eh.  "Normal" Bigelow was OK.  Kroger brand was dishwater.  Twinnings was a bit harsh.  And then I discovered Tetley's English Breakfast Tea. Whoa.  Smooth but rich, even when steeped a tad too long. This almost tastes like what I remember having in Australia.  And I guess they think you'll feel fancy by making you fish the bag out with a spoon instead of giving you a string to haul it in with.  Whatever.  But it is a pretty nice cup of tea.

So, I'm a tea-heathen lazy American.  What am I missing out?  Is loose tea really worth the extra hassles (and presumably expense)? 

Noticed this thread at last.  By my last count I have at least 25 loose leaf teas and some untold varieties of bagged.  Is it worth it?  Yes.  I love tea.  I drink it at home and at work. 

Is loose leaf worth it?  I think so.  I get more mileage out of loose leaf tea and it is easier to brew batches for company and mass consumption.  Luckily, there is a small bulk food outfit in town that has a selection.  If you have anything like that in your area, start there!  You can pick up small amounts for little money and find things you like.  Early investment can be pretty cheap.  You can use a stovetop kettle and a single cup infuser basket.  Later, if you get into it, you can buy yourself a machine and get fancy cups etc.

I have a machine (thinking of getting a different one).  I have a few fancy cups that do not see any use.

Still loving the tea robot (have a cup of genmaicha from it at hand right now, in fact), so yeah, I consider loose tea to be absolutely worth it.  But like Pezzle pointed out, fancy stuff is hardly necessary just to try it out and see if you like it.  Just for the love of God don't walk into a Teavana store; they'll try to sell you four hundred bucks of crap and tell you that it's all absolutely vital for making tea.  For the tea itself use a decent online tea place if you don't have any locally-owned tea stores; adagio sells sampler packs with small portions of several different teas to try out.

I've been drinking roasted dandelion root tea the past couple of days. It's not bad. Generally I drink Kukicha. white tea, or herbal teas, but the dandelion root tea I can have with (soy) milk, so it's a bit of a different tea experience for me. About to try a spiced variety, which should be interesting.

I and the cafes I work for use this.

(http://i.imgur.com/5RVIYl.jpg)

This thread convinced me to buy my own specialist tea machine.

(http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/4921/teamachine.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/41/teamachine.jpg/)

The tea goes in the container at the top. The water goes in the machine and is heated using the hot plate at the bottom - you have a choice of 85, 95 or 100 centigrade. Then it goes up through the handle, and back down through the container with the tea in it, which is also a strainer. This takes place over a period of a few minutes - you can set the machine to make weaker or stronger tea (five settings to choose from), which determines how long the straining takes.

In theory, the fact that the tea is strained rather than stewed improves the flavour. I don't know if that's really true but it does make very nice tea.

Doesn't restraining it lower the caffeine levels?

Fair question, I've got no idea. It wouldn't bother me though. I don't really want the caffeine as I want to drink lots of it, although I hadn't realised straining the tea might reduce the caffeine level.

I know percolator coffee makers have lower caffeine.

As a British-born person, I need to inform you again that nobody makes tea in anything like that ever.

You're not making tea, you're doing some American thing I don't know about.

I got myself a nifty steeping cup.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/111434/nifty.jpg)

It doesn't fit together that well, as you can see, but it works well enough.

Here is a 1988 US news story in which my grandmother drinks tea (http://clipshack.com/Clip.aspx?key=79C0E88C172AE282) - she's at the table in a blue dress and says "today is, I should think, one of the nicest days we've had". They are drinking tea as it is properly made in the UK. Hot water poured onto leaf tea in a teapot, allowed to steep for a while, then poured into teacups.

You may be right but to avoid any confusion let me point that that my tea robot lives in my kitchen in sarf London beneath a cupboard full of Jaffa Cakes and Marmite and seems to fit right in. It does make a lovely cup of tea.

In fact I'm going to skive off work and head to Harrods to buy some posh tea to put in it, now, literally.

That's a pretty interesting tea robot, I'd be very interested to find a taste test somewhere between that system and the steeping style of the other ones.  My gut inclination is that water+leaves gets the same result whether the water is sitting still or being poured over them, but I'm definitely no expert.

What a teapot should look like:
(http://i.imgur.com/SUOY2.jpg)

If it doesn't, you're Doing It Wrong.

No, I'm doing it awesome.   :awesome_for_real:

Working for a coffee shop chain I often get to see how even the simplest drink machines break down, not to mention costly espresso makers. Washing limestone out is also a regular maintenance task if you're in the Serving Hot Beverages With High Mark-ups business. So if it comes with a list of error codes I don't think I want it making me tea.

Does anyone else drink their tea non-sweetened? I used to drink tea with 2-3 teaspoons of table sugar ever since I was a kid. About a year ago I got more seriously into the diet&exercise lifestyle and started avoiding sodas, fruit juice and everything with table sugar in it. For a while I used honey or glucose, which as a sweetener is as effective as sniffing Post-Its to get high. A tablespoon of honey is as sweet to me as two spoons of white sugar. Since it's summer and a few months ago I had a kidney stone I try and keep myself hydrated. A friend of mine started drinking unsweetened tea because she was worried about her dental health.

I don't drink a lot of tea, but I only do unsweetened.  Preferably a strong green or similar.

I used to drink a lot of green tea, but these days only once or twice a week. Usually my daily routine is one or two mugs of English Breakfast (varying brands) in the morning for the bit of caffeine in it, then throughout the day 3-6 mugs of white tea (http://shop.clipper-teas.com/teas/white/organic-white-tea). I really love white tea, but it isn't very strong so the water must be hot enough and it needs to be infused properly, otherwise you'll be drinking slightly tea flavored water.

I'm not really a "tea elitist" and also I'm lazy so I mostly get my tea in bags, however I do drink it all unsweetened and most importantly with no added "flavors".

Best cup of tea I ever had? Cooked in a 60 year old billy (essentially a metal bucket) over an open camp fire. Nothing comes close.

A little hard to replicate in the kitchen though.

*gag*

I cannot stand the taste of unsweetened tea.  I grew up drinking sweet(ened) tea and have never managed to tolerate it without anything in it.  I have significantly cut back on the amount of sugar I use though and don't drink it too often.

I grew up always hateing the taste of tea, but after Japan, developed a taste for cold green tea (mainly as a water substitute).  I like drinking that and other cold teas, but just cannot stand sweetend tea in any form now.  Which makes it hard in America, since every bottle of tea I find is filled to the brim with high fructose corn syrup.   :heartbreak:

I'm the same about sweetened tea - ugh, and take all of my tea (and coffee) sans adulterants.  I do miss the corn tea (oksusu cha) that I used to drink (hot or cold) in Korea.

You must be below the Mason-Dixon line.

Why would you ever sweeten tea? WTF?

Much like if you ask for tea over here it's always iced tea -unless you're at some sort of ethnic restaurant- it's just about the only way you can get it in the Southern US.    Sweetened Iced Tea.