What makes the perfect cup of tea?

Articulito extraido de The Guardian

Is it lovingly grown and delicately picked on a famous estate, then prepared by a master craftsman? Or is it the stuff you can stand a spoon in?


With milk? Sugar? With a biscuit? What's your idea of the perfect cuppa? Photograph: Guardian
What do George Orwell and Waitrose Food Illustrated have in common? They both know how to brew the perfect pot of tea. Orwell wrote an essay on the subject in 1946, and WFI's wisdom is revealed in their June issue.

Waitrose's wisdom is based on a survey of the 70 members of the magazine's "tea panel". The panel calls for English Breakfast loose leaf tea, steeped for 3.5 minutes precisely in a pre-warmed china pot. It should be served in a mug, not a cup, and the tea must go in first. No sugar allowed. Orwell gives no numbers in his recipe, but he and the tea panel agree on most things.

…... For me, however, the most interesting point of comparison is that it shows how the British attitude to tea is still stuck in a gastronomic time warp. In a world that's awash in groovy leaves, plain old black tea with milk is still considered the perfect potful.

Don't get me wrong. Builder's tea is a fine thing - I drink the stuff myself - and blending to create consistent drinkable mass-market tea bags is a laudable skill in its own right. But in the tea hierarchy, the Tetleys and PG Tips of the world rank somewhere near the bottom. Yet people who wouldn't touch, for instance, a "value" supermarket sausage or tinned soup are content, at breakfast, to drink any old industrial-grade tea as long as it has milk in it. It seems the so-called food revolution has bypassed the nation's favourite hot drink.

The herbal and fruity contingents are not really what I'm talking about here, even though they can be attractive enough fluids (their claims to induce spiritual and medical wellbeing are another matter). But they will never replace the nation's cuppa, because they don't taste like tea. Tea has tannins, and caffeine; it soothes but it also braces.

For me, the top of the tea tree at the festival was East Teas, a partnership between Alex Fraser and Tim d'Offay, who buys tea for his excellent shop Postcard Teas in London (Mayfair, in fact, which puts the 'ooOOOoo' into oolong). Fraser is an expert on the Japanese tea ceremony, and drinking tea with him shows what a refined aesthetic experience the sipping can be. The cups are tiny, the brewing attentive and exacting; each tea has a recommended temperature at which the water should be poured.

And the teas themselves? They're in another league. This is not industrial production but the work of artisans, many of them named along with the region and often the farm where the tea bushes are grown. The idea of milk and a mug seems like a travesty when you're faced with the thrillingly grassy aromas and flavours of Wazuka Sencha, from a famous tea area in the Kyoto prefecture.

Teas like this are more expensive, naturally, than the likes of Red Label. But they're still not that expensive. Mouthful for mouthful, they cost less than a decent supermarket Côtes du Rhône. And everyone I know who tasted them at the festival was blown away by their quality and variety.

Is this what tea means to you? ………Did they get it right, or did they brew up the wrong recipe? You know how you like your tea. Tell the rest of us how to do it perfectly.