No, of course we don’t microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.
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The patriot in me smiles every time I microwave the water. Yankee Doodle, motherfuckers.
Where’s throwing it into the harbor fall on this chart?
Far left
The USA was apparently built on communism.
I’m an American who drinks tea. I’d love to hear from our distant countrymen on how accurate this is.
For a start, you don’t make tea in a kettle, you boil the water in that, then either pour into a mug or a teapot
That’s how I do it. Electric kettle. Glass.
I refuse to believe that Randall doesn’t know how tea is actually made, so it has to be a meta-joke / troll.
Jokes on you, my kettle comes with a built in steeper, so I make my tea in the kettle!
100% spot on. Microwaved tea is comparable I would say to microwaving a steak
The state of education is extremely depressing holy shit.
Aww fuck. Now that you put it that way, I get it.
It’s foul. Cup of Tannin, more like.
… wait, there are some americans who put the tea BAG in the microwave with the water?!?
I’ve MADE tea using a microwave before and it was ALWAYS “heating the water in the microwave, then adding the teabag to the hot water”, it never even crossed my MIND to have the tea bag inside the microwave, and frankly that sounds AWFUL.
Maybe, who knows? Reheating tea though is absolutely foul. Worse than reheating coffee, somehow, and reheating coffee is pretty bad.
Why would you reheat tea in the first place? Just pour more boiling water in it.
Preaching meet choir.
Close enough to zero to be a rounding error, I’d bet.
Not British, but in my experience… accurate.
I mean, I’m also not British and am roughly aligned with this spectrum myself.
Look, if you can tolerate the absolute nonsense you hear from Americans about how to make coffee you can deal with me having a spice rack specifically to make tea.
What nonsense do you hear about making coffee?
Everyone has their own way, but there’s no wrong way.
I make coffee by drinking hot water, then chewing whole coffee beans and swallowing them. I then wash it down with milk.
Eh, chocolate-covered coffee beans aren’t bad, if they’re reasonably fresh. That’s not too different.
Really the only way you can do coffee wrong is if you boil it.
I got a free bag of those from the shop where I buy my coffee once. They’re really nice. I absentmindedly worked my way through the bag that afternoon, wondered why I was feeling so ill, and then realised I had consumed about two pots of coffee in pure bean form
is it even on the chart when my water cooler at home has a hot spigot that dispenses water at just the right temperature for tea brewing? it’s basically like having a kettle that’s always ready…
In the neighboring State from where I live in Brazil, a lot of gas stations have publicly accessible hot water taps. Even some parks and plazas have them. It’s for the Mate drinkers to refill their Thermos.
I fucking love the water cooler heaters, mine does ice cold on one side and boiling on the other and it’s heavenly to have both immediately ready with water other than my horrifically heavy (and thus fuzzy) tap water
I got mine for less than $60 at Walmart like 5 years ago and it’s still going strong, highly recommend to anyone
Patrick Stewart once said American tea was one thing he would never get used to. “For a proper cup of tea the water must be boiling when it hits the leaves.” He really didn’t like being brought a carafe of somewhat hot water with a teabag next to it. Even as an American I can relate.
Yeah the kettle is just for boiling the water, nobody makes tea in it, that would wreck it. Yes, I’m English.
Kettle boils the water, the TEAPOT steeps and serves the tea. Somehow people end up thinking they’re the same thing.
<Shaking the head with a samovar, smiling slightly disgusted about the paper taste.>
Loose leaf or bust! Keep the tea bagging to online shooters
So, where do I put my gaiwan on the spectrum?
For when you actually want 10 tiny cups of tea.
Rookie numbers! Try 20-50 tiny cups.
At some point you need to admit you’re just drinking brown water and not tea anymore.
If you run into that problem, you need more tea leaves. Also, puerh can produce an amazing amount of tea.
Yeah, depends on the tea too. I have some teas that are done after 3-4 steeps, and some that just never end.
Needs to map sweet tea that the south enjoys.
Not perfectly relevant, but I’ve always enjoyed Professor Elemental’s take on tea.
Do Americans make tea in a kettle? Teabag inside the kettle?
Surely putting tea inside a kettle would stain the kettle?
Apparently I’m committing all the tea sins. I definitely make tea in a kettle. But if I do that, I boil the water before adding the tea bags. Isn’t that pretty standard? I’d only do so if I’m making a lot of the same tea (or iced tea), usually for a group of people
For that there is a teapot. Some can be continuously heated up, just through external heating methods, such as a candle!
Making tea in a kettle severely decreases life of the kettle and even after washing, some amounts of aroma compounds will remain, affecting the taste and aroma of whatever you boil water for next
I think we may have different definitions of a kettle. I mean something like this:
Which you put on the stove. I can’t imagine that having tea in this is a problem at all. It’s just glass.
I’ve also done this with something like:
Which I could imagine keeping more of the taste/being a problem.
I assume you mean something like this by a kettle?:
Yes, I mean an electric kettle indeed, the last one
No problem brewing tea in glass, that’s how teapots work.
My husband is Northern German, close enough to England that he was horrified at the thought of making tea in the microwave. And he doesn’t even really drink tea when he’s not sick.
Ha, my sister lives in Germany and the weirdest thing she finds about German tea habits is that they only drink tea in winter, which I guess is kind of on a par with being sick. In the UK tea is a constant but in Germany it seems to be more of a special circumstances thing (illness, cold weather…). Even the person my sister buys her tea from shuts up shop in the summer because there’s no market for it.
Tea is an inefficient delivery system for caffeine. If there’s no caffeine in it, it’s a warm beverage that relaxes you. So why would the industrious German worker bee want to bother with tea bags when coffee is right there? Unless of course the bee is sick and needs to relax, doctor’s orders, to get back to work as soon as possible. ;)
Proper good tea is way more expensive than coffee anyway. And buying inexpensive coffee (beans) can easily be masked by milk and sugar…
Austrian here and I too would never make tea in the microwave. (I too drink tea mostly when I am sick.)
How about someone who leaves the tea bag in the mug, sometimes for multiple days? Sips the tea with multiple bags still in it? It creeps me out and I am not even a big tea drinker.
What the fuck
Made me think of that eternal stew, but you instead add in more and more tea bags
I’ve done that a few times. Mostly when the previous bag was used the night before, and I was super sleepy in the morning, so didn’t even bother ditching it, saving 1.3 seconds and thinking it would make my new tea stronger.
…yeah, I don’t do that anymore. But this is why I used to.
UPDATE: I just made my tea just the regular way this morning. While stirring, I realised I had left the previous night’s red berry tea bag in it. I didn’t want to waste an otherwise perfectly fine bag of Earl Grey, so I did it again. Not intentionally, though. Also, note to self: red berry Earl Grey is not great.
i had a co worker - who i assume didn’t want others to use his mug - who had a special day each year for washing his tea mug. It was soooo gnarly and crusty the rest of the year, he would gleefully take the clean mug around the office and show everyone on cleaning day. weird dude!
I once had a colleague who would get hysteric when someone would clean the coffee machine. People are weird. Not cleaning tea potts and even mugs is also quite common among elder germans. They argue it tastes better that way. (They drink the tea without sugar or milk, so it probably isn’t thaaat bad.)
blech, people are weird.
