How does Veeky Forums make tea?

1) Tea is not much of a thing over here.
2) When we are into tea we get Asian-style hot water boilers.
3) The standard household outlet here is half the power that it is in the UK. That means our electric kettles suck. It's much faster to use a pot or kettle on the stove.

110V is laughable for high power applications like heating water with a resistive element.

not trying to be funny hibiki-an.com/sp/contents.php/cnID/3

most green teas are brewed at 176° with gyokuro an outlier at 150-168°and hojicha (roasted green tea) at full boil

American here

It's just a cultural thing, the same reason we don't use the metric system. I drink tea and use an electric kettle but the vast majority don't and if they do drink tea it's those shitty bottled teas that have HFCS and use low quality tea scraps.

Yes, you should definitely buy loose tea leaves. They're of much higher quality than the shit they put in tea bags. It's not really that expensive because high-quality leaves can be reused several times. Make sure to follow brewing instructions for the type of tea you purchase because brewing at the wrong temperature will ruin the taste. I recommend using a water boiler on which you can set the temperature it will power off.

...

Cold brew only. Mix some leaves or tea bags into a big pitcher and let it sit in the fridge over night. Drink it the next day.

Brewing tea destroys the anti-oxidant content of the tea.

MTfag here. Tap water is god tier, but I dislike the taste of boiled water. So hot as I can muster and I use Twinning's English breakfast or this "new here" Newman's Black Tea.

Forgot pic

An everyday tea is also not more expensive than buying shitty tea at the grocery store. Last time I bought tea was a pound of Davidson Earl Grey on Amazon, it was about $15.

I have never heard of that, but I am going to try it.

White tea is the only tea that benefits from cold brewing in terms of antioxidants, perhaps because green and black teas have undergone processing. If you want to maximize absorption you should also get some vitamin C with your tea. There's also some disagreement whether milk interferes with the antioxidants of tea or not but if you want to be safe you should probably avoid consuming dairy products and tea at the same time. Matcha is the best if you care about antioxidants since it it's ground and the antioxidants become more concentrated compared to tea leaves, be warned though that heavy metals and fluoride content of matcha is also higher so you shouldn't drink too many cups of it a day.

Tea leaves are quite expensive in dry weight but you need only 2-4 grams per cup and each batch of tea leaves can be reused 3-5 times making the range 75 to 250 cups per 100 grams of leaves.

Wow. You are a Douche with a capital D.

>boil tap water in a water cooker
>put some tea (flavored, sweet, loose-leaf) in a large glass cup
>if green or white, splash the leaves with some cold water from the tap
>fill cup with hot water
>let seep until the temperature is palatable
>if leaves get inside mouth, eat them
There's a small tea shop a few kilometers from me. Not super fancy, but better than what the grocery stores have.

>if leaves get inside mouth, eat them
I cut open some types of tea bags to chew on them.

Recommendations for tisanes? Trying to avoid caffeine at night. I've got spearmint and the two types of Gan Zao Ye from Verdant Tea. Don't really care for chamomile.

Because we have microwaves, stove tops, and some have hot water faucets (no, I mean for nearly boiling water out of a separate faucet).

Bongfag master-race of tea reporting in.

PG tips or Typhoo teabags usually. Posh brits call it builders tea.

I'm living in Paris at the moment though, so I have to go to M&S for their extra strong bags and boil a saucepan because the apartment I'm renting hasn't got a kettle.

It's worth it – lightly milked strong teabag tea is fucking gorgeous and built the greatest empire of all time. Also doesn't give halitosis like coffee.

>go out in backyard
>get leaves from bushes or trees
>boil water
>throw leaves in cup
>pour water
>let it brew for 5 minutes
>drink my poverty tea

Hibiscus or rooibos. Really the only ones I tried and can think of.

>Is it worth getting loose leaf?
Abso-fucking-lutely.

I wonder how that tastes.
Probably just like hot water and nothing else.

There are many other types of infusions (e.g. see and for examples) so it's not entirely impossible that you'd end up with something nice and drinkable.

>Is it worth getting loose leaf?
Yes, but I think it's harder to get right than bagged tea. I've left a bag in a thermos all day and the flavor remained consistent, but if I oversteep my loose leaf by two minutes it's basically ruined. Also, temperature actually matters.

You can think of it as buying a nice steak over some ground chuck, easier to mess up, but waayyyy worth it.

Bring water to a rolling boil in a pot. Pour into my 2 liter thermos. Add 4 hibiscus tea bags and two black tea bags. Drink.

I'm glad America is finally moving out of the orange cut pekoe rut. Lipton has and will always be my intro to tea so no problems there.

Pic related is what I used to drink 20 years ago before work. Coffee is just too heavy a beverage for me.

> Fill kettle
> Turn kettle on
> Put teabag in cup
> Kettle boils and turns itself off
> Wait for steam to clear, pour water into cup
> Add milk/sugar
> Stir

If you do it any other way you're not just wrong, you're stupid.

>and some have hot water faucets (no, I mean for nearly boiling water out of a separate faucet).
We have those here too. My neighbour installs them. According to the advertising on his van, they come with chilled, filtered, and carbonated water as well as boiling.

It seems unsafe, to me. As well as expensive and wasteful in terms of electricity.

My mom used to make me sleepytime tea on colder nights. She passed away a few years ago. I still have the retro box in my cabinet, I've tried the new stuff but it doesn't taste the same.

wait until kettle stops making noise, pour into french press where tea leaves are, wait a few minutes, push down and pour, repeat a few times with same leaves

is there anyone on Veeky Forums who is actually into tea?

I put 5-7g or so of sheng into my gaiwan and resteep 10+ times depending on the leaves. American with an electric kettle here. I usually drink w2t, but have a bunch of ys as well.

If you're not aware of the wonders of puer or real chinese tea, just go order a bunch of samples and a cheap ~100ml gaiwan from ys or w2t.

/tea/ threads aren't usually this bad, but yes

I don't have a gaiwan because I'm afraid of catching autism, but I do drink a lot of Chinese green tea. Right now I've got some iced tea in the fridge made of nilgiri bop and this almond-flavored black tea from Upton. It's the tea equivalent of amaretto, so it doesn't taste that much like almonds, more like some kind of fruit.

You won't catch autism, don't worry. You can get small cheap ~3 dollar porcelain gaiwans on yunnansourcing, they're surprisingly not a meme. Also a lot of Chinese greens there.

Summertime fridge cold brew tea is the best. I've got a pitcher of matcha genmaicha going right now.

you have a much larger water heater in your home, why are you scared of a smaller one

I get my water heater up to 195F or 208F setting. Add a little bit of cold water for green tea or just pump the water out straight for black tea. Leaves go in an infuser basket and sits in my cup for a minute or two.

They're pretty cool. They have one at a place I work sometimes. It stops if you take your finger off the button.

>you have a much larger water heater in your home, why are you scared of a smaller one

The main water heater doesn't dispense boiling water from a tap.

To make dirty leaf water I heat water with a shitty electric kettle I got from Goodwill because it's faster than using my stove top because electric range. I can't be assed to use a thermometer so I just estimate where my temperature is based on bubble size, usually just boil it for black and oolong. I use a lot of leaf compared to the amount of water and short steep times (like 15 to 30 seconds) in a small french press that's never been used for coffee because it has a finer mesh filter than any of my dedicated teaware. I only make about one mug at a time, infusing the same leaf repeatedly. It seems like it'd be nice to have one of those fancy Japanese hot water dispensers but I'm cheap.

Bongs are the worst at making tea of all the tea drinking cultures, except perhaps the American south.

depending on your heater it can provide boiling or near boiling water to your entire house if you turn up the heat on it. we have a gas flame water heater and I turned it up and you can burn yourself if you use just hot water.

I don't know about elsewhere, but in the US it's not recommended to drink hot tap water because of concerns of increased adulteration, especially lead regardless of the plumbing material in the house.

>Microwave water
Get a kettle and boil it you uncivilized savage

I toss like2 or 3 tetley orange pekoe bags into a kettle with some water and turn it on. Let it boil for a while and then drink.