I’ve been drinking iced Earl Grey with no sweetener for years. How do you do your brew?
I make Chai from scratch decently often. I use whole spices, give them a couple cracks with a pestle and add them to a pot of boiling water along with loose leaf black tea. I then let it continue to boil, or just cut the heat for a couple minutes, then add milk. I then bring it back to a boil, and wait for it to try to boil over. When it tries to boil over, you beat back the foam and take it off heat for a little. If you do that over and over, eventually, it won’t foam up anymore because those proteins have denatured. That’s when the tea gets that nice and silky texture. I’ll also throw some honey in there.
I always make a big pot and have plenty of leftovers for cold chai.
I don’t really measure anything, even though I should. I also change up ingredients. At a minimum, I always have green cardamom, ginger, and tea, but sometimes I also use black cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, aniseed, nutmeg, black pepper, or vanilla.
- Heat water to 70 degrees using electric kettle.
- Put loose leaf green tea in a strainer thingy. Leave room for it to expand 4 times as big
- Swoosh some of the 70 degree water around a glass kettle to heat it up, pour it out.
- Put strainer with tea in glass kettle.
- Pour water over tea.
- Let sit for a few minutes.
- Drink.
- Reuse the same leafs throughout the day using same steps.
I usually use unflavored green tea with decent quality. Very different from tea bags.
Ive been mostly doing western style with an infuser basket and a temperature controlled kettle, but I also have a gaiwan for when I feel like sitting down and doing a gongfu session.
Spring/summer Im mostly drinking chinese greens (longjing and biluochun) and high mountain oolongs (alishan, baozhong, dong ding). Fall/wintee I might still have those occasionally but Ill do more wuyi and dancong oolongs (shuixian, duckshit), and the occasional ripe puer
With bags like a savage usually, no sugar or milk. I’d up my tea game but I’m usually more of a coffee drinker.
As a British person, I want to go mad with the downvotes here.
Wondering how it is done in Britain is a big part of what inspired this question. What would your say is the common method?
Tea bag in a mug. Boil the kettle. Pour boiling water into mug. Give it a little stir and leave it for a couple of minutes. Remove tea bag. Add sugar and milk to desired taste. I’d say that’s probably the way most brits make a cup of tea.
Whether or not you have sugar is quite controversial too. I was raised in a “look down on the sugar people” family. Some people are more live and let live. I think I try to be the latter but if you say you want 3 sugars I have my nans voice in my head going “If you hate the taste of tea that much just have something else”.
