If you’re a tea enthusiast, you may have pondered how exactly to make the perfect cup of tea. Is there a right approach to boiling water and adding it to the pot or mug? What water should you use? And perhaps the biggest one (especially in the U.K.) — do you put milk into the cup before the tea?
The water questions are more easily settled. Once your water is boiled and your carefully-stored tea picked out, it’s not worth fretting about whether you should put tea in the pot first, then water, or vice versa. Whichever way you do it, the tea starts steeping the moment it hits the water, so there’s no real difference. You can find questionable claims that pouring water over tea can over-steep it, causing bitterness as the moving water forces more flavor out, but this seems to be a rarely-expressed problem.
That said, there are pointers when it comes to boiling water. Don’t re-boil water that was already boiled, and pour the water into the pot as soon as it hits boiling point; this is because (over-)boiling pushes oxygen out of the water, giving the tea a flatter taste, as oxygen helps flavor develop. Filtered water is best because this eliminates minerals from the water that add a bad taste; if your local tap water tastes neutral, it’s probably okay. Bottled water may work well, but it can be finicky since you want to avoid distilled or mineral versions as they can interfere with flavor.
The big milk question
While debates about water may be the domain of hardcore tea drinkers, the question of whether to add milk or tea to your teacup first has been more widely debated. In Britain, a semi-common folktale is that historically, only poorer people added milk first, as their cheap cups would break from the heat if the tea went in first. But those poorer folk may have been onto something: A British chemical engineer studied this exact issue, and the answer is that the milk should go first.
This is because the milk hits the tea more unevenly when poured in second, causing a process called denaturing. Here, the milk proteins lose their form and clump up, which causes that skin you’ll sometimes see on top of hot tea. Texturally, most people would find this gross, hence, milk first so it has more uniform contact with the tea, avoiding this issue.
This process is harder to do with tea bags, though (although arguably, loose-leaf tea is better). Adding milk first works better for tea made in teapots. You don’t want to add milk to a cup first if you’re planning to steep the tea bag in that milk-infused combination, because the temperature won’t be high enough for the tea to infuse. You could always infuse the tea and then add it to another cup that has milk in the bottom — it’s an annoying extra step, but science suggests your tea will be better off for it.
