Storm In A Paper Tea Cup

I’ve just searched the Internet for instructions on brewing a particular tea.

Not because I wanted to know, but just because I had a shrewd idea what I might find.

And find it I did.

The first item to come up was 880 words. It involves scrolling down four times, it has eight really useful pictures.

I mean, who knows what a small cup looks like, without a handy picture? Or what it would look like if you then put the leaves in it? And then next picture is water, in case you have not seen it before. And the next picture shows the water being added to the leaves. Riveting stuff!

OK, so I deliberately picked a tea which is usually drunk by people who love nothing better than to extol its virtues online, usually in a smug and self-inflated way.

So, casting aside Gyokuru, I did the same with “Darjeeling”.

This time, I ended up with 271 words, and one picture. A picture of a nice looking china cup, full of tea, with a teabag on the saucer.

WHAT? The article is clearly about loose leaf, yet the picture shows some new kind of teabag, because although the tea is brewed, the teabag is still dry, sitting on the stylish plate like a pustulant cancerous growth on a lovely face.

Whilst admirably shorter than the first article, 271 words is still a lot.

Let’s try just ‘black tea”…

Ok, I had to wade through a few detailed  instructions from deluded half-wits who think making a tea involves a tea bag, but four clicks down, came to a reasonable set of instructions. Leaving out the first three quarters of the post where she bangs on about her Grandmother and fails to get to the point (yes, I know, pot, kettle, etc.) the actual instructions are 281 words, virtually the same as above.

Let’s try green tea:

Here’s one I found on howmaketea.com (really) . It’s only 115 words, so here’s the lot:

First of all you need to get tea brewing of high quality. Buy green tea of the highest quality – only in this case you can be sure that you will get useful drink. Then you have to take a kettle and pour some boiled water into it. The kettle must be hot when you add your brewing there. After that you have to add hot water (of 70-90 digress) and leave your tea for 10 minutes. It is important! After that you have to pour the water from your kettle and then add another portion. You can drink green tea only if you brew it for the second time. Then you can enjoy your drink.

It is a little odd, but I think that’s just a language thing. Clearly English is a struggle. The ‘second time’ stuff is a bit odd. And I’m fairly sure that he  might actually mean that you should  “wash” the tea for 1o SECONDS. If you are going to wash a tea for ten minutes you might as well be making soup.

Each time I did this search, I was offered a “8-step” video on making each type of tea. Really? Life is too short…

Anyway, the point of this is that it’s pretty hard to find tea making instructions that are not highly detailed and bit naff. And this leads me (sound of trumpets) to my first actual point here.

Tea is nought but this: first you heat the water, then you make the tea. Then you drink it properly. That is all you need to know. – Sen Rikyu.

I know that Sen Rikyu spent most of his life “clarifying” this to mean exactly the opposite, like a politician caught out in a lie but really, it’s great!

I think it is the ideal counter to the “Ur doin’ it wrong”.

Every time I assert that I don’t like a particular tea, I run the risk of being told just that.

Not just on teas that are self-evidently only enjoyed by the truly insane, but even fairly regular teas.

I don’t like Long Jing much. Gyokuru tastes unfortunately like Gyokuru. Genmaicha is an abomination of biblical proportions. These truths I hold to be self-evident, to borrow a  phrase I saw on an old episode of Family Ties the other day.

Each time I mention these things, someone says “oh, you’re probably heating the water to 163 degrees F instead of 162.4 ” or, “did you use a pot made from clay that has been blessed by a traditional tea master?” or my favourite “you would if it was prepared properly.”

Oh, really?

I had a conversation the other day about the KLiP infuser device and one guy say, ‘I never use an infuser, I only use loose leaf tea’.

What?

I love a nice china teapot. We have many. We have cups from lovely little Japanese thimble-sized ones to mugs of about 500ml or more – I have three favourites that are well over the old-fashioned Imperial pint.

We also have a dozen metal infusers, several silicon ones including a duck, a robot bird, a submarine, a strawberry and a flower. We have metal teapots, glass teapots, a cha dao cup, four tea tumblers, a gaiwan. In the cupboard are those open-topped tea filters that look a lot like an empty tea bag. We have an electric teamaker in the back of the cupboard that I don’t like much.

I make tea on the stovetop, in a jug, in a cup, in a pot, in a tumbler.

But sometimes, you get caught out. You have tea, but nothing to make it with. A hotel room, a friend’s house, an office.

And rather than compromise, I end up making tea in a makeshift way.

I have brewed tea in a polystyrene cup, strained it through a colander into a glass. I have rigged coffee filters as strainers. I have heated water in any number of ingenious ways, usually without setting off fire alarms.

And I have come to this belief:

• You can place tea in anything that is almost certainly waterproof and moderately hygienically clean
• You can boil water and just wait a minute or two if it’s an oolong or green for the temperature to subside.
• You can strain it using anything from the back of a spoon to a small,virtually unnoticeable and quite deniable piece cut from an unworn nylon stocking.

And when you find yourself doing this MacGyver-like guerrilla tea making, that’s when you find out how good a tea is. Not when it’s brewed in a laboratory or elaborately in a rice paper hut, but on the go, when you need it most.

So, lest I be misunderstood here, I am going to restate that I like to take the time to make a properly brewed cup of tea so it tastes as good as it can.  I hate polystyrene cups and I have no idea why there is a small bit missing from your nylons.

But if a tea can only taste good if brewed by a seventh dan black belt with a masters in Chemistry, then it’s not only a tea that’s not worth having, but it’s half the reason so many people use teabags.