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No, of course we don’t microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.
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Needs to map sweet tea that the south enjoys.
I’m an American who drinks tea. I’d love to hear from our distant countrymen on how accurate this is.
Not British, but in my experience… accurate.
I mean, I’m also not British and am roughly aligned with this spectrum myself.
Look, if you can tolerate the absolute nonsense you hear from Americans about how to make coffee you can deal with me having a spice rack specifically to make tea.
For a start, you don’t make tea in a kettle, you boil the water in that, then either pour into a mug or a teapot
That’s how I do it. Electric kettle. Glass.
I refuse to believe that Randall doesn’t know how tea is actually made, so it has to be a meta-joke / troll.
Jokes on you, my kettle comes with a built in steeper, so I make my tea in the kettle!
100% spot on. Microwaved tea is comparable I would say to microwaving a steak
It’s foul. Cup of Tannin, more like.
… wait, there are some americans who put the tea BAG in the microwave with the water?!?
I’ve MADE tea using a microwave before and it was ALWAYS “heating the water in the microwave, then adding the teabag to the hot water”, it never even crossed my MIND to have the tea bag inside the microwave, and frankly that sounds AWFUL.
Maybe, who knows? Reheating tea though is absolutely foul. Worse than reheating coffee, somehow, and reheating coffee is pretty bad.
Why would you reheat tea in the first place? Just pour more boiling water in it.
Preaching meet choir.
Close enough to zero to be a rounding error, I’d bet.
The patriot in me smiles every time I microwave the water. Yankee Doodle, motherfuckers.
So, where do I put my gaiwan on the spectrum?
For when you actually want 10 tiny cups of tea.
Rookie numbers! Try 20-50 tiny cups.
At some point you need to admit you’re just drinking brown water and not tea anymore.
If you run into that problem, you need more tea leaves. Also, puerh can produce an amazing amount of tea.
Yeah, depends on the tea too. I have some teas that are done after 3-4 steeps, and some that just never end.
:(
You disgust me
Not perfectly relevant, but I’ve always enjoyed Professor Elemental’s take on tea.
<Shaking the head with a samovar, smiling slightly disgusted about the paper taste.>
Ok, but, why is microwaved water any different the water warmed in a kettle?
This seems like a pointless thing to get worked up over.
Went to see Randall doing his book promo and being interviewed by Matt Parker (in the UK) recently and this was his exact position on it
The audience were not on his side 😆
Water warmed in a kettle has much more even temperature in all points, which affects the brewing process. Generally, the more even the temperature is, the more consistent and rich is your brew.
I would consider microwave boiling as a makeshift method to produce a mediocre result when you need it anyway, not as a daily driver.
How does a kettle warm the water more evenly but a microwave doesn’t? When a kettle has it’s heating element only at the bottom but a microwave blasts the entire mass of water with energy because it sits on a rotating plate.
Exactly because of that.
Hot water moves upwards, and if you heat it from the bottom, you get a more even result than if you blast it from all sides.
Cold water falls to the bottom of a kettle and boils on the bottom. Microwaves can miss the bottom, possibly?
Microwaves can miss the bottom, possibly?
Boiling water mixes itself, also: no
I’m asking this from a place of genuine ignorance: how does the evenness of the heat distribution matter when microwaving a pure liquid? I’m familiar with the microwave’s uneven heating qualities. I’m sure we’ve all bit into food that is scalding hot on the surface and still lukewarm at best in its interior. However, I’ve always presumed that is a product of microwaving a heterogenous, predominantly solid substance.
So, sure, the microwave applies heat unevenly to the water. But wouldn’t the tiny little bits of water which get “over” heated simply diffuse their excess thermal energy into the rest of the homogenous volume in very short order? Furthermore,wouldn’t an uneven heat distribution in a mug of water simply lead to convection currents flowing from hot to cold, therefore promoting a relatively even distribution?
The overheated particles will rapidly move upwards, which will lead to relatively even distribution in a layer, but uneven between heights.
In fact, in a large microwaved mug the difference between top and bottom can be as much as 6°C/11°F.
Using a kettle mitigates it for the most part, as it is the bottom that gets continuously heated, and the top is then naturally heated by the vertical currents of hot water, leading to a more even distribution.
Surely stirring the water in the microwaved mug and giving it another round easily solves this issue.
Ideally 2 to 3 rounds, yes.
But at that point, isn’t it easier to just buy a kettle? It doesn’t require such manipulations, costs next to nothing and allows you to rapidly boil up to 1,5-2L (0,4-0,5 gal) of water for all your needs.
There’s a good reason most of the (Western, at least, dk about other places) world uses them and considers them a basic piece of kitchenware.
In the US, kettles are supposedly much slower than a microwave or even a hob due to their grid.
In my experience you won’t actually boil water in the microwave because it takes an eternity so you end up with tea in “warm” water instead. Or apparently some people also put the tea bag in the microwave ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Brother it takes 3 minutes to boil water in the microwave. I have done this without fail.
It cools down much faster though. Not sure how that works.
It doesn’t cool down faster. That makes no sense.
Listen I can’t prove it, but I swear on my mother it does
You can prove it by boiling the water in different ways, putting a thermometer inside and then filming/timing it :D
It may appear that way if it was unevenly heated, causing pockets of boiling water surrounded by comparatively cool water. This would make it look like it’s boiling, but then, when mixed, it is then much cooler than if heated by a kettle that relies on convection to mix the water.
Because only some of the water boils, not all of it.
My microwave must be really weak then. The kettle is still faster though
Could be a problem if you microwave it together with the tea bag.
Also I find microwaves to not heat up the water properly, leaving some cold spots.
Hard to believe that cold spots could stay for more than a moment with the Brownian motion.
Do you not add gelatin to your water before making tea?
Modified corn starch, miss me with those animal products (I actually am not vegan).
The microwaves will heat your water more evenly than a kettle.
Liquids have this amazing property, that if you heat them , they auto-stir just by themselves.
(But personally, I’m uneasy about microwaving a tea bag with paper on one end, or worse, a staple. There’s probably no problem at all, but it doesn’t feel that way.)
So give it a quick stir? Also if it’s at a boil, the bubbles are going to mix the fluid well.
is it even on the chart when my water cooler at home has a hot spigot that dispenses water at just the right temperature for tea brewing? it’s basically like having a kettle that’s always ready…
I fucking love the water cooler heaters, mine does ice cold on one side and boiling on the other and it’s heavenly to have both immediately ready with water other than my horrifically heavy (and thus fuzzy) tap water
I got mine for less than $60 at Walmart like 5 years ago and it’s still going strong, highly recommend to anyone
In the neighboring State from where I live in Brazil, a lot of gas stations have publicly accessible hot water taps. Even some parks and plazas have them. It’s for the Mate drinkers to refill their Thermos.
Loose leaf or bust! Keep the tea bagging to online shooters
My husband is Northern German, close enough to England that he was horrified at the thought of making tea in the microwave. And he doesn’t even really drink tea when he’s not sick.
Ha, my sister lives in Germany and the weirdest thing she finds about German tea habits is that they only drink tea in winter, which I guess is kind of on a par with being sick. In the UK tea is a constant but in Germany it seems to be more of a special circumstances thing (illness, cold weather…). Even the person my sister buys her tea from shuts up shop in the summer because there’s no market for it.
Tea is an inefficient delivery system for caffeine. If there’s no caffeine in it, it’s a warm beverage that relaxes you. So why would the industrious German worker bee want to bother with tea bags when coffee is right there? Unless of course the bee is sick and needs to relax, doctor’s orders, to get back to work as soon as possible. ;)
Proper good tea is way more expensive than coffee anyway. And buying inexpensive coffee (beans) can easily be masked by milk and sugar…
Austrian here and I too would never make tea in the microwave. (I too drink tea mostly when I am sick.)
Yeah the kettle is just for boiling the water, nobody makes tea in it, that would wreck it. Yes, I’m English.
Kettle boils the water, the TEAPOT steeps and serves the tea. Somehow people end up thinking they’re the same thing.
Where’s throwing it into the harbor fall on this chart?
Far left
The USA was apparently built on communism.
Patrick Stewart once said American tea was one thing he would never get used to. “For a proper cup of tea the water must be boiling when it hits the leaves.” He really didn’t like being brought a carafe of somewhat hot water with a teabag next to it. Even as an American I can relate.
