If you love tea, then this is some very important information.
As a nation, Ireland loves tea. LOVES it.
We’re regularly counted as some of the biggest tea drinkers in the world. In 2012, Irish folk were recorded to drink more tea per capita than any other nation. In 2016, we slipped to second place behind Turkey.
The point is, we love tea. And it turns out a lot of us have been making it incorrectly. And no, we don’t mean this absolute nightmare fuel.
Speaking to Newstalk’s The Hard Shoulder, professional food and drink taster (What. A. Job!) Martin Isark has said that most of us are burning our tea when we make it, because we use boiling hot water:
“It burns the tea and stops it releasing full flavour. The only reason that we boiled water is because the the water wasn’t good quality when it first came about. So people boiled it to get rid of the bugs. Most people’s water is pretty damn good.”
So how do we go about making our tea taste better? Isark has two solutions – use a better kettle, or use some basic chemistry:
“If you’ve got a kettle that delivers the right temperature, has a temperature gauge on it, that’s perfect. But a simple way of doing it is you boil the kettle, and for every percentage of water – so if you want the tea down to 80% – you add 20% of cold water – you’ll get water at 80%, and then that’s the perfect temperature for black tea, which is your teabag tea.
“If you put 80% into your cup, and then you put a teabag in it, then let it infuse for a while – then you take it out and you put your milk and sugar in it, then you’ve got a perfect cup of tea.”
So there you have it. Put the kettle on and put it to the test.
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