Archive for October, 2009

Did you know that tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world? The first, of course is water.

Here some more interesting facts to mull over whilst you enjoy your brew.

1. Until the nineteenth century, solid blocks of tea were used as money in Siberia.
2. The Irish drink more tea per head than any nation in the world.
3. According to legend, Tea was accidentally invented in 2737 BC when Chinese Emperor Shennong spotted some tea leaves blew into a pot of boiling water and produced a pleasing aroma. Some also claim that Shennong invented the plough.
4. By 1800 England alone was consuming 24 million pounds of tea per year. Most tea consumed in England between 1650 and 1850 was green and oolong – not black as you may think.
5. Tea first appeared in Europe (Holland) in 1608. From then until about 1850 China, with rare exception, was the sole source of all the tea drunk in the Western World.
6. The English East India company held a monopoly on all China tea exports to the British Isles and Americas for two hundred years.
7. Just as in 1608, China continues to recognise and exports six categories of tea, green, white, oolong, yellow, red and Puer.
8. Tin boxes were too expensive, so New York importer Thomas Sullivan looked for a cheaper way to send his tea samples to clients. Wrapping the tea in gauze “packets” seemed the perfect answer, but his customers were bemused by the new “packaging.” Instead of removing the tea, they dropped it, gauze and all, into boiling water. Without realising it, Sullivan had created the tea bag!
9. Tea contains about 50% less caffeine than coffee, making it a great alternative to those that are sensitive to caffeine intake.
10. An average of three billion cups of tea are consumed daily worldwide.

There are 11 rules for perfect tea making, rules from which nobody should dare depart, said George Orwell in the Evening Standard on 12 January 1946.

Orwell said that tea – one of the “mainstays of civilization” should never be sweetened, stating that anyone reaching for the sugar bowl is not “a true tealover” and   “Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter,”

Here are Orwell’s guidelines

1. Use tea from India or Ceylon (Sri Lanka), not China
2. Use a teapot, preferably ceramic
3. Warm the pot over direct heat
4. Tea should be strong – six spoons of leaves per 1 litre
5. Let the leaves move around the pot – no bags or strainers
6. Take the pot to the boiling kettle
7. Stir or shake the pot
8. Drink out of a tall, mug-shaped tea cup
9. Don’t add creamy milk
10. Add milk to the tea, not vice versa
11. No sugar!

However scientist Dr Andrew Stapley, a chemical engineer at Loughborough University, challenged Orwells methods arguing that the novelist was wrong on a number of points.

According to Stapley, Orwell’s six-spoons of tea per pot – hugely extravagant when the author set down this rule at the time of post-war rationing – is still far too strong today. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) endorses no more than a single spoon of leaves.

As for adding milk to the tea after it is poured, the RSC issues a firm scientific warning against the practice. It seems that dribbling a stream of milk into hot water makes “denaturation of milk proteins” more likely.

“At high temperatures, milk proteins – which are normally all curled up foetus-like – begin to unfold and link together in clumps. This is what happens in UHT [ultra heat-treated] milk, and is why it doesn’t taste as good a fresh milk,” says Dr Stapley.

So, according to science, it is better to have the chilled milk at the bottom of the mug, awaiting the stream of hot tea. This allows the milk to cool the tea, rather than the tea raise the temperature of the milk, spoiling it in the process.

Also, in contrast to Orwell’s rules, science seems to bear no grudge against those who take sugar with their tea – provided it’s white sugar. The addition of sugar gets the ok since it “acts to moderate the natural astringency of tea” – which to your average tea drinker terms means ‘makes it less bitter’.

In spite of all this, Orwell would welcome some elements of Dr Stapley’s perfect cuppa, he suggests using Indian Assam tea leaves, about which Orwell said no other nation’s tea made him feel “wiser, braver or more optimistic”.