The casein in milk neutralizes the beneficial antioxidants.
What kind of teabag do you use for a perfect cup of tea? Store brand, or Lipton?
Hong Kong’s famous milk-tea, a Chinese-South Asian derivative of British tea, includes boiling the tea with egg-shells and dried dates, and filtering it while pouring it back and forth (for aeration) through a woman’s stocking (preferably not used...)
with condensed milk and sugar added.
Video of Patrick McGoohan instruction #86 on the proper way to make a cup of tea:
https://youtu.be/ZiNX91hHw8g?t=2089
The “scientific way” I would have thought involved the steeping time.
I thought Eddie figured this out years ago (slightly obscure Hitchhikers reference).
An extra bag in the tea pot also helps. Tetley tea, round bags, has always been our go to product. Nice to have in the afternoon/after dinner with cookies.
“Dr Stapley found that if you pour milk into a hot tea, the milk will heat unevenly which will cause the proteins in your milk to alter their natural quality.
This is the main cause of floaty bits that sometimes appear at the top of your cup.”
No, the main cause of those floaty bits is that the milk is starting to go off.
I learned that if you do drink milk in tea it goes in first. So his finding is not new.
Wait a minute, it is up to me. Who am I talking to here?
Five minutes at power five in my microwave does the trick just fine. I tell my wife that’s how the Queen does it when nobodies around.
Hubby is British. He buys Tetley British Blend at Kroger or Publix.
He always says, “You don’t take the kettle to the pot...but the pot to the kettle.” And always head the pot beforehand with hot tap water. IOW....the tea has to be as hot as possible.
“He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariable delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaint department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.”
-Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy
I fill a large electric tea kettle with water and on the highest tea settings, I boil it until it atomically stops and begins counting down the brew time. I drop six or seven black tea bags in the kettle and fish them out within 15 or 20 minutes. Then I put twenty packets of splenda and twenty packets of stevia in the pot and pour half of it into my 34 oz. clear glass mug.
I want my tea to stand up and salute me before the first sip and then kick me in the groin right after.
Just to put this in the right context, in 69 years, I never forced myself to drink coffee. It looks and tastes like burned toast as far as I'm concerned.
I don't even drink Tea, but I know that.
The first rule of “a nice cuppa” is start with loose leaf tea. The mulched crap they put in teabags isn’t worth drinking (except iced, and with lots of sugar).
I hate milk in my tea.