Ireland and England’s ‘best’ teas, reviewed by an American

boing
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Celestial Seasonings has its roots in an early version of the herbal medicine and health food store scene from the 70’s. So while they are less of a tea as life fixer thing these days that’s largely because they’re owned by a big food company now. Its the same root as the more explicitly medicinal products.

The largest tea aisle near me features mostly brands with smugly happy white women and flowers on the label. The teas are all pitched by their supposed benefits. Skin beauty. Weight loss. Menstrual cramps and bloating. They feature the phrase “you go girl” and direct references to the stress of raising children in explicitly gendered terms on the label. Its like watching a swirling whirlpool of strange gendered life style marketing and alt med claims (which are also commonly marketed directly to women). Its a black magic yogurt commercial. If you check the top right shelf they have Twinnings though. They seem to keep the real tea brands in the international aisle.

From what I understand from home brew. And my intense knowledge of whiskey. Irish water is very hard. Hard water tends to do better for making darker beers (which the Irish do) and lime stone heavy hard water is considered best for making whiskey (which the Irish also do).

With cheap bagged tea water chemistry shouldn’t really play a roll. But in taste testing filtered water scores poorly compared to tap. And teas made with bottled mineral water rated best. So all things considered harder water is probably better for every tea.

Yeah I would recommend you try what passes for Tea most of the time in the US. Your basic “just won’t give me the jitters tea” is the fancy stuff here. Tea geeks (to be found [everywhere]
(George Orwell: A Nice Cup of Tea) ) will seldom complain about European supermarket teas. Whether PG Tips, or Barry’s, or Yorkshire, or Lyons. But they won’t go near Lipton and Bigalow.

NOT SO FAST

Its more of a “what decade were you born in” revealer.

The Russians have an interesting solution to this. Traditional Russian tea service involves brewing very strong tea concentrate (using lots of tea not long extraction) that is then cooled. A cup of tea is made by taking this fresh concentrate and heating it up with fresh hot water from an urn or kettle. Its different, but its nice.

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Dude, that’s a Cornish Cream Tea (as God intended) not that weird (probably Satanic) Devonshire variant with the cream UNDER the jam!?? :wink:

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I enjoy that this thread both contains plenty of posts about how drinking tea is unfairly criticized in the US as not masculine, and then a whole bunch of criticism of people who use cream as not manly enough.

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I cut my tea with pure cod sperm. Nothing else will telegraph the size of my penis to all of my peers.

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I hope your hops don’t bleed! :wink: (FTR, there are quite a number of herbal infusions containing hops, and I bet there is such a thing as Hopfenblütentee for real.)

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[quote=“Ryuthrowsstuff, post:103, topic:99429, full:true”]
So all things considered harder water is probably better for every tea.[/quote]

If I didn’t miss the irony tag again, I am bound to interject:
WRONG.

Hard water is bad for your tea.

There are differences based on the ions involved, but it is still bad for your tea. Either way, it changes the taste towards soapy, and causes tea scum.

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I would have done that as well, but it was hard to get good cod sperm in the 60’s when you lived in Michigan …

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As per the actual taste test conducted in the article I link to. Tea made from NYC tap water which is mostly on the soft end of the scale. Was rated poorly. Worse was filtered water. Which would be even softer in that it would have less of the minerals that determine hardness. The bottled mineral waters were rated much higher. Mineral waters are typically somewhere approaching the “hard” end of the spectrum, because the same things that make them “mineral water” are what make water hard. PH and the specific minerals driving it could also be a factor. I would imagine very hard water might be an issue, simply because it is for most things. But then I have pretty hard water at home and my tea doesn’t taste soapy or get scum.

So I’ll stick with generally harder water is gonna produce a better tea. Most of the schmancy tea shops that treat their water are adding specific ions to filtered water that would make it generally speaking “harder”. If not into “my shower head no longer works because I have hard water” territory.

ETA: just to clarify. Harder water. As in with a noticeable mineral content. Rather than distilled, filtered, or otherwise neutral water. I don’t doubt that if your water is hard enough that you notice for things that aren’t soap scum of chemistry that it could cause some weird.

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But its the fun kind of stupid!

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So…do you brew six bags of constant comment?

I mean, you know what they say:
nothing exceeds like excess!

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Only when I can’t get Harney & Sons Cinnamon Spice!
And then I don’t sleep for a week.

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Hell, this is getting truely stupid. I even had to calculate ppm from “1-5 grain per gallon”, and realised only afterwards that in the US of A, they use the term wrong in relation to water hardness: they say 1 ppm, and mean 1 mg CaCO3 / l.

Anyway, I don’t trust those tasters. :wink:

I suggest we try Fisher’s exact test to find out if NYers can taste the difference between tea and coffee, and work us up from there.

Also:
Spiro, M., & Jaganyi, D. (1993). What causes scum on tea?. Nature, 364(6438), 581-581.

Tanizawa, Y., Abe, T., & Yamada, K. (2007). Black tea stain formed on the surface of teacups and pots. Part 1–Study on the chemical composition and structure. Food chemistry, 103(1), 1-7.

Yamada, K., Abe, T., & Tanizawa, Y. (2007). Black tea stain formed on the surface of teacups and pots. Part 2–Study of the structure change caused by aging and calcium addition. Food chemistry, 103(1), 8-14.

…and so on, and so on.

It’s rather complicated, interesting, challenging, and confusing (sometimes) - but ultimately clear: an excess of calcium and magnesium carbonates in water are not good for your tea. Personally, I would say anything above 1.5 mmol/l of CaCO3 are bound to make your tea much less enjoyable.

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I’m pretty sure I got it from Amazon the last two times I ran out…so it shouldn’t be that hard to find. Er, in the states at least.

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I’d kind of like a samovar, but it seems like a ridiculous thing for someone who lives alone and rarely entertains guests to own. Maybe for the office? I know I’m not the only black tea drinker there but I’m not sure how much company I have. The tea cubby is mostly full of green teas.

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Yeah it’s one of those things like an absinth fountain or a duck press where you’re all like “that would be awesome!”. But makes zero sense in practice. My Russian friend brews in a regular tea pot, stores it in any given quart container in the fridge. And adds hot water from a kettle. Works the same.

She did buy several cheap electric samovars to serve tea at a baby shower. They look like those black and silver catering coffee pots. And aren’t really practically different.

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Making biscuits is not difficult. When I went to California and ordered biscuits for breakfast, I got some wack piece of round bread. But, wtf would californians know about making a biscuit, anyway? It’s not their fault. Similarly, the cultural background for proper tea-making in the US just isn’t there. If there were a financial incentive, then it would be remedied in short order, but there isn’t one.

what kettle? the non-existent kettle of perpetually boiling water that we keep on-hand for a drink that nobody ever orders? we have scalding water out of a tap on the tea or coffee machine used for brewing the aforementioned iced teas and coffee. the tap is heated from a coil as it pours, the water comes straight from the plumbing.

this is what we have. this is why you get warm water. if you’re going somewhere that has a “barista,” then you may be entitled to something better, but of course, this depends on the materials they are provided by their employers. If they don’t move a lot of hot tea (and, statistically, they don’t) then the financial incentive for those materials just isn’t there. sorry. it is what it is.

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You are quite correct, making Clotted Cream some sad butter analogue by spreading it under the jam is just wrong. It’s the cream tea’s crowning glory.

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Well, since I have to go for mascarpone, mostly… :wink:

But I would love to try a proper high tea you would approve of, that’s a fact. As long as you actually do use proper tea, and not this bagged rankings, or CTC curls.