I prefer to drink my tea straight, but my dad likes his tea with milk and sugar and I found this really interesting passage in The Black Tea Bible so I thought I’d share it with everyone today! I never really thought about what to put in my tea (because that does not come naturally to me), but apparently there are a set of guidelines.

(Unless this is just Japanese black tea culture, in which case it’d be interesting as a cultural case study.)

Milk
The book recommends milk that was pasteurized at a low heat because it preserves the original flavour and nutrients of milk. And you might be interested to know that the book doesn’t take a stance on whether you should put milk in first or tea – instead, it just says that you should warm the milk to room temperature before adding it to the milk (or vice versa) so that you don’t make the tea too cold.

As for the milk-first-or-last argument, I have heard that putting in the milk first used to be because the cool milk would protect the delicate china cups. But I always wondered – wouldn’t it be too easy to add too much milk if you put it in first?

If it helps, science says its milk first (according to The Guardian). Now I just have to tell my dad.

Sugar
The book took three paragraphs to say “use granular sugar”. I shall leave it at that.

Lemon
Okay, this one is more interesting because I’ve never known what to do with the lemon. The last time I willingly added lemon to tea, it was to change the colour of the Conan butterfly pea tea (and that made the tea taste like lemonade).

Anyway, the book says that while the sourness and fragrance of lemon goes well with tea, you only really want a hint of lemon because the oil from the peel can mix with the tannins from the tea to make the tea even more bitter. And since tannins are responsible for bitterness and astringency, it’s pretty obvious why you wouldn’t want that. While you can get around this by peeling the lemon before placing it in the tea, it’s quite a hassle so you might as well settle for dunking it in and out of the cup to just get the aroma.

I feel like this has been rather rambly and maybe a bit more pointless than the other Tea 101 posts that I’ve done, but I’ve been wanting to write this for the longest time and I’m glad I did.