George Orwell’s Rules for the Perfect Tea – Right or Wrong?

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”.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Cuppa Facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.