How to brew a perfect cup of tea with teabags, by Tea Taster Dominic Marriott

I’m going to show you how to brew the perfect cup of
tea using a teabag. When people are using teabags
they are often in a rush, and they don’t make the tea
properly.


The first thing you should do is take your teabag and
put it in your cup. Some people would actually also like
to warm the cup first so that it will help the tea brew.
Next, we need to take freshly boiled water. If the water
is already boiled, it would have lost a lot of oxygen and
that will mean the tea won’t brew properly and the resulting
infusion will be flat and dull. So, you must always
use freshly drawn water and allow the water to come
fully to the boil. It should reach 100° Celsius for the tea
to brew properly. So as the kettle is now coming to the
boil we just turn it off so again it doesn’t over boil and
lose all the oxygen. Then pour this straight onto the
teabag. So, we want the tea to brew as close to 100°
Celsius so it gets a really good infusion.

My Managing Director always tells me that you should
treat teabags as you treat a loose tea, so give it as
good a brew as possible. One of the things you can
do if you’ve got a saucer, is cover that over to help keep
the heat in. This is where people often go wrong with
a teabag. They will stand and dunk a teabag and as
soon as the colour looks about right they will think it’s
ready to drink. Teabag tea is the same as any tea, it
needs time for the full flavour to come out. For teabags,
we say you must give it a minimum of three minutes to
brew properly.


So we have now given the tea a good three minutes to
brew. Take the saucer off and we will just give the tea
a little bit of a dunk to help it mix even better. Now it’s
looking like it’s got a good strong colour, but the flavour
will also have come out. Take this teabag out. Also give
it a little bit of a squeeze to get all the flavour out.

And there is your perfect cup of tea. You can drink that
however you like: you can drink it black, or with a little
bit of milk, or lemon, or sugar - that’s up to you. You
have now given the tea a chance to develop the full
flavour which we intended.