CHERTSEY

BOATS, BRIDGES, BOILERS ... IF IT'S GOT RIVETS, I'M RIVETTED
... feminist, atheist, autistic academic and historic narrowboater ...
Likes snooker, beer, tea, rivets and solitude, and is strangely fascinated by the cinema organ.
And there might be something about railways.
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Wednesday 13 March 2013

Proper tea rights

I have made a number of new friends at work here in Sheffield, and sometimes they like to go to a 'coffee shop' to drink frothy hot milk with a little bit of coffee in it. As hot milk comes second only to scrambled eggs in the litany of Things I Can't Stand, and black coffee, let's face it, is something you really have to be in the mood for, I tend, in a triumph of hope over experience, to order tea.

I used to think it was a good sign when somewhere offered a pot of tea - and maybe once it was. But now it seems dinky little pots are a must-have for any establishment with pretensions to class. The tea they deliver is usually derisory, however, for one simple reason. They take a two-cup pot (wouldn't be any point in offering a pot otherwise, would there) and they put a one cup teabag in it. Result: lightly straw-coloured water. To add insult to injury, this is then usually presented with a chunky, wide, shallow cup in which the 'tea' instantly goes cold once poured.

So I have started a one-woman campaign (the Campaign for Proper Tea Rights) to get two teabags in a pot at - and this is the important bit - no extra cost. My reasoning is that if the menu offers tea at a certain price, then tea, not gnats' piss, is what it should provide at the stated price. The cost of a teabag - even a half decent one - is on my estimation approximately 1% of the cost of the entire coffee shop tea experience, so this is not too much to ask. So far I have had a 50% success rate (i.e. one out of two). In the successful case I did in fact get a whole second pot, as I only realised how weak it was after it had been made. The offer to immerse a second bag in the no-longer-boiling water was politely declined, and I pointed out how marginal the cost was, and got a reasonably decent pot the second time around, albeit still with the obligatory  'Instacool' cup. The second time, I made the mistake of asking - rather forcefully - before the tea was made, and while I got the extra bag, I suspect I was charged for it. And they quite possibly spat on my oatcake as well.

Now, you (yes, you, Starcross Jim) may well be sitting there shaking your head and saying, why all this fuss about teabags, when you can only make a decent pot of tea with loose leaves. Well, I accept that the very best, the apogee of tea, is probably that made with one's favourite blend of loose leaves, in a good, clean, warmed pot, and served in best bone china. But leaf tea is very easy to bugger up too, and to be honest, a good quality teabag (I'm favouring Yorkshire Gold at the moment) is at least more reliable in the hands of a barista. Certainly, give me a teabag any day, plonked in a mug, doused in boiling water, stirred, left, stirred again, then milk added, than some of the attempts at leaf tea you get served in cafes. Because at least in a bag, the tea has room to move and to brew. Places wanting to serve trendy leaf tea have these pots with the little strainer thingummy in the middle which is sometimes packed so full of tea that the middle isn't even wet. Result, once again, gnats' pee. (Solution: tip the contents of the strainer into the pot, give it a good stir, let it brew, then pour it through the strainer into the cup.) And that's if the stuff is tea anyway - the places trying really hard to be trendy seem to use a mixture of multi-coloured leaves and twigs and bits of bark, perhaps not realising that there's a reason tea leaves are traditionally chopped up very small.

The sad thing is that most people who think they drink tea, actually want to drink lightly coloured water with some milk in it; either that or they don't care. I have the same opinion of people who ask for weak tea as Jay Rayner has of people who ask for their steaks well done - they simply don't deserve to have it at all. Likewise (I have seen this said by one who should know), most people who think they are terribly sophisticated about coffee really just like slightly coffee-flavoured frothy hot milk.

Of course the place to go for a good cup of tea is not a coffee shop, or even a 'tea shop', but a proper old fashioned caff where it will be served in a white Pyrex mug and either poured from a big (but fresh!) pot, or made with a teabag and super-heated water. Sadly though I haven't found one round here yet. And I very much doubt if my colleagues would accompany me there if I did.



8 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Hoorah Sarah! I would say Bravo, but it wouldn't be British would it, and we are talking about tea.

    I now boycott BHS and other establishments who don't offer a tea pot. I really can't understand why, when they can take an inordinate amount of time and trouble to produce froffee coffee (whilst also producing a huge queue delaying would be tea drinkers) when they can't be bothered to produce a decent pot of tea.

    Good on ya, more power to your teapot!

    Chris http://nbwrensnest.wordpress.com/

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  3. One (slightly potty?) suggestion: take your own "emergency" teabag with you. Then you could slip it in to a weak pot and get decently strong tea - at very little (financial) cost to you. Doesn't get round the Instacool cup problem, though. (But this may be the equivalent of taking your own beer into a pub to top up any short measures, something I would certainly not advocate.)

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  4. Oh - and one of the best drinks of tea I get is from George's stall on Norwich market. It's served in a mug, and it somehow manages to stay hot to the end, even when accompanying a fry-up on a cold day.

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  5. Sarah you are spot on right about getting a good cuppa in a greasy-spoon cafe... and as the 'coffee chains' struggle with the concept of coffee they NEVER get my custom either.

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  6. As I've been mentioned in dispatches I'd like to point out that I can't bring myself to go into anywhere that has "baristas" for a coffee - let alone a tea. Like Halfie, I find market stalls a good bet but the last time I had tea made with proper tea-leaves from a cafe was on the top of Portland Bill in about 1988!
    Of course, nowadays being a bus pass holder I just take a flask with me when I go out for the day :-)

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  7. Still brewing tea with 'proper tea-leaves' at the Lobster Pot, Portland Bill when we went there last month!

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  8. That Sheffield has been a bad influence, never been near nor by anywhere with a 'barista' before as far as I know. What is a barista in any case and why do you need a 2:1 in English to be one? I am with the other Jim all the way, bloody young people and there silly ways.

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