How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea

Run the tap a little so the water’s nicely aerated, and only boil it once to keep the oxygen level up. Oxygen in water helps flavour!

Pop a tea bag into your mug, pour over the hot water and stir briefly.

Tea needs time to unlock all its flavour, so give it 4-5 minutes to do its thing. This is a perfect time to munch a sneaky biscuit or daydream about holidays.

Before removing the tea bag, gently squidge it against the side of the mug. Just the once, mind – if you really mash it, it'll taste bitter.

We like a splash of semi-skimmed or whole milk, but your brew is unique to you – so add dairy milk, plant milk, sugar, honey, lemon or nothing at all. Most importantly, enjoy!

Did you know that lots of people brew their tea for less than a minute?

Some people just don’t like to wait around, and others don’t like it too strong. Luckily, the tea leaves in tea bags are small, so they have lots of surface area in contact with the water – which means they can do a good job in a short space of time. But to really get a full flavour, we always brew ours for 4-5 minutes. And we remove the bag after that, otherwise the tea can taste a bit stewed.

If dairy’s not your thing, you’ve got a ton of alternative options.

Plenty of people just drink it black – and if that’s you, you might like to brew it for less than the 4-5 minutes we suggest above. But if you’re adding plant milk, there’s no right or wrong answer. Soy, oat, almond, rice, coconut… they all bring something slightly different, so it’s all about what tastes the best to you.

One of the things that makes tea taste so lovely is its bitterness. It’s one of those flavours that’s brilliant in the background, but a bit horrid if it becomes too overpowering.

A little squeeze helps to get some of the most flavourful tea into your cup – but get too squidge-happy with the teaspoon and you risk extracting all of those bitter flavour compounds, which can make things taste a bit out of whack. This is also why the old classic of brewing for a really short time, then trying to speed things along by mashing the living heck out of the tea bag, isn’t the ideal path to a tasty brew.

It’s a good question! Nobody really adds milk to green tea (unless it’s matcha) or oolong tea - and the same goes for most fruit and herbal teas, too.

There are also plenty of lighter black teas that are generally drunk without milk, like first flush Darjeeling. But the reason strong black teas, and especially black tea blends, go so well with milk is because they’re much bigger on those more potent flavours like bitterness and astringency – which is just the sort of feistiness that the creamy, very slight sweetness of milk calms down.

So, when should you add the milk[AT1.1]? It’s an issue that divides tea drinkers into two camps: those who pour the milk into their mug first (Miffys) and those who pour their boiling water in before the milk (Tiffys). Like the Montagues and the Capulets, these warring factions may never see eye to eye – but the truth is that this great debate can be solved in less time than it takes to dunk a digestive.

In case you don’t want to read a whole separate article, here’s the lowdown: it’s all a question of heat. Tea brews best in very hot water but adding milk cools things down. So, if you’re brewing tea directly in a mug, it’s better to add the milk last, after it’s brewed. And if you’re brewing in a teapot, the order doesn’t matter at all – it’s just a question of personal preference!