How do you take your tea?

Enjoy the perfect cup of tea in a city built for coffee drinkers.

By Stephanie Clifford-Smith

Sydney is a city that’s all about coffee. Before the cocktail hour it’s the drink most meet up for, and even for a rushed solitary cup, everyone has their favourite baristas, blends and roasts. This leaves tea drinkers with a pretty raw deal. It’s rarely as bad here as it is in France where a self-styled ‘Tea Salon’ will bring you a cup of tepid water with a teabag on the saucer and charge five euros for it but the Sydney scene is still not good. People go out for coffee because it’ll be better than anything homemade but, with very few exceptions, it’s the reverse with tea.

There’s nothing wrong with the raw materials available to lovers of the leaf. We grow great tea here and import some of the world’s best from China, Japan, Sri Lanka and beyond. And Sydney water is soft which is great for tea making; we’re lucky not to have the tea flavour masked by hard water minerals.

The major problem with having tea in a café is that it’s made with less than boiling water. Water needs to be 100⁰C to get the most flavour from the tea but most cafes just use water from the coffee machine which is about five degrees cooler. Unless they warm the teapot or the cup first that water is going to drop another few degrees on pouring so try as you might that tea will never rock your world.

Assuming you’ve given up waiting for your tea to brew to a decent strength and you’re desperate to drink it, when do you add your milk? Ignore the old school idea of putting it in the cup before the tea; this originated at a time when milk was unpasteurised and it was thought the hot tea would scald and kill any bacteria. Pour the tea first so you can assess the colour and strength then decide how much milk you need, if any.

Herbal teas are also best with boiling water but green tea is a better choice in a café because it tastes less bitter when made with cooler water. Ideally green tea should be made with water at 82⁰C which is a fair bit cooler than the coffee machine water, but hey, only the most specialised tea places will get that right.

There’s nothing you can do about those leaking stainless steel teapots cafes sometimes use, the ones with the burning, ergonomically unfriendly handles, so, again, you’re better off at home. Here you can make sure your water is boiled but not overboiled thus preserving dissolved oxygen in the water which improves the tea’s flavour. And you can brew for exactly the right time for your tea and your taste.

How do you take yours?