[teleforce]

The BBC has come up with an excellent short documentary on how to perform proper tea preparation [1].

Essentially the hot water need to be boiling hot (100 degree celcius) and leave it brewing for a minimum 4 minutes after pouring into a cup of tea.

From personal experiences, if you want to make good chai masala (or spicy milk tea) you need to keep it in boiling water for considerable amount of time (like cooking on stove), with the ingredient of tea (generous amount), equivalent amount of evaporated and sweetened condensed milk (like half can of milk for medium pot), together with combination of your preferred different spices for examples cinnamon (Sri Lanka cinnamon not the fake ones), jeera, clove, star anise, etc. Since the condensed milk is already sweetened, no need to put sugar, but you can add pure honey for extra wonderful aftertaste.

In UAE, karak chai is their national drink that are sold in most of the restaurants and eateries. Fun facts, and heaven knows for whatever reason the default tea brand being used there is always Lipton.

[1] How you've been making tea WRONG your entire life - BBC:

https://youtu.be/Fhuc6qOGNPc

[gilrain]

This is like claiming everyone is making coffee wrong and then describing how to make a cappucino with city roast Nigerian dry-process beans.

Yep, cool. That’s a recipe. For one type of preparation. With one type of bean. And one style of roast.

The ignorance of global tea culture in the west, including Britain, is very cringe.

[speedgoose]

It’s funny to witness many British people being so much into tea, while they mostly drink poor quality tea with bad technique.

A bit like many French people having a shitty failed dark coffee as breakfast every morning.

[eru]

Of course, the BBC being British, they only tell you how to brew British style tea.

For proper tea, you should probably look at Asian sources.

[gilrain]

To be fair, the British invented and innovated that style of tea. You should only look east if you’re interested in the many other styles.

[IAmBroom]

> cinnamon (Sri Lanka cinnamon not the fake ones)

My god, this thread has really brought out the virtue-signalling Anglophile snobs en masse!

There are no "fake" cinnamons. Three different species of the genus Cinnamomum are harvested, with slightly varying qualities and market values.

It's not like when Americans buy "Mexican saffron". That is open fraud, because Mexican "saffron" is neither related genetically (it is a thistle, not a crocus), nor in taste (it is essentially a food dye).

[card_zero]

(Jeera == cumin. "Fake cinnamon" I guess comes from species in the genus Cinnamomum other than the Sri Lanka / Ceylon species.)

[t-3]

Mainly just avoid Chinese cinnamon/cassia, as it has a more complex bitter flavor (good for savory, not so much for sweet).

[xattt]

Science has shifted, depending on the discipline, from a colonial universalism perspective to one that accepts that “the truth” varies and can be a local phenomenon.

I have a hard time buying into a prescriptive tea-making procedure. For example, you can heat up your temperature to boiling, but by the time you pour it, it will likely be down to the low to mid 90s.

There’s other factors such as the material of the mugs (which might be more or less conductive of temperature) and the delta between the water and air temps. The composition of the tea itself will also vary year-to-year and you have no idea of the vintage of the Lipton/Tetley tea bag dust stock you’re buying.

tl;dr Strict procedure = placebo

[Enginerrrd]

One thing I noticed is that the water matters.

I noted that when visiting my sister down in the Bay Area, I had to steep for quite a bit less time before the bitter tannins would start creeping in. Like 1.5-2 mins tops for cheap PG Tips. But that same tea up north could sit for 3-4 minutes before the bitter tannins would creep in.

It was a marked difference so there are obviously some confounding factors. I suspect the water chemistry matters a fair amount.

[IAmBroom]

Other solutes in the water, like calcium chloride, can indeed greatly affect the solubility curves of the flavor compounds.

You can buy premixed packages of salts to dissolve into distilled water to precisely reproduce the composition of the well waters of some famous breweries, even though the result mostly still tastes like water.

[card_zero]

One confounding factor is how much you want a cup of tea at that time.