Experiments on how to make tea (well does milk go in before or after) is the original exposition of statistical testing of the null hypothesis.
of possible interest
George Orwell's 11 rules of tea making
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
quite interesting but I would have expected some insight into the preparation itself as how long do you have to steep, what temperature should the water have, etc
The BBC has come up with an excellent short documentary on how to perform proper tea preparation [1].
Essentially the hot water need to be boiling hot (100 degree celcius) and leave it brewing for a minimum 4 minutes after pouring into a cup of tea.
From personal experiences, if you want to make good chai masala (or spicy milk tea) you need to keep it in boiling water for considerable amount of time (like cooking on stove), with the ingredient of tea (generous amount), equivalent amount of evaporated and sweetened condensed milk (like half can of milk for medium pot), together with combination of your preferred different spices for examples cinnamon (Sri Lanka cinnamon not the fake ones), jeera, clove, star anise, etc. Since the condensed milk is already sweetened, no need to put sugar, but you can add pure honey for extra wonderful aftertaste.
In UAE, karak chai is their national drink that are sold in most of the restaurants and eateries. Fun facts, and heaven knows for whatever reason the default tea brand being used there is always Lipton.
[1] How you've been making tea WRONG your entire life - BBC:
Of course, the BBC being British, they only tell you how to brew British style tea.
For proper tea, you should probably look at Asian sources.
To be fair, the British invented and innovated that style of tea. You should only look east if you’re interested in the many other styles.
Science has shifted, depending on the discipline, from a colonial universalism perspective to one that accepts that “the truth” varies and can be a local phenomenon.
I have a hard time buying into a prescriptive tea-making procedure. For example, you can heat up your temperature to boiling, but by the time you pour it, it will likely be down to the low to mid 90s.
There’s other factors such as the material of the mugs (which might be more or less conductive of temperature) and the delta between the water and air temps. The composition of the tea itself will also vary year-to-year and you have no idea of the vintage of the Lipton/Tetley tea bag dust stock you’re buying.
tl;dr Strict procedure = placebo
One confounding factor is how much you want a cup of tea at that time.
(Jeera == cumin. "Fake cinnamon" I guess comes from species in the genus Cinnamomum other than the Sri Lanka / Ceylon species.)
This is like claiming everyone is making coffee wrong and then describing how to make a cappucino with city roast Nigerian dry-process beans.
Yep, cool. That’s a recipe. For one type of preparation. With one type of bean. And one style of roast.
The ignorance of global tea culture in the west, including Britain, is very cringe.
It’s funny to witness many British people being so much into tea, while they mostly drink poor quality tea with bad technique.
A bit like many French people having a shitty failed dark coffee as breakfast every morning.
I'm not sure there's much real scientific research on preparation (at least when this was published in the 90s), especially as it can be quite subjective. There's a bit about factors affecting caffeine content on p.425:
> The quantity of caffeine that infuses into a tea brew is determined by infusion time and by leaf style. Longer infusion times lead to greater quantities of caffeine in a tea beverage. Smaller sized tea leaves give a more rapid and stronger infusion, whereas larger leaves and uncut leaves lead to weaker infusions. This results in more or less caffeine extraction, respectively. The caffeine content of a typical tea beverage will range from 20 to 70 mg per 170 ml of infusion, with a typical infusion being prepared from about 2 to 2.5 g of tea leaves. Coffee brews typically contain from 40 to 155 mg caffeine per 170 ml beverage. There has been little research done on the pharmacology of tea-beverage caffeine. One study suggests a dose of caffeine from tea has a different physiological effect than a pure dose of caffeine (Das et al., 1965). This has been attributed to the amino acid theanine, which is unique to tea. However, there are no well-designed clinical studies to support this position. The consensus among scientists today is that caffeine from all beverage sources has a similar physiological effect. The actual content of caffeine depends on many factors, particularly the method of brewing. A brew prepared by the Chinese "gong-fu" style is likely to have a different caffeine impact compared with the Western style of loose tea or to that from a tea bag (Hicks et al., 1996). Some reports have suggested that green tea contains significantly less caffeine than black tea. This may be influenced by the clone of leaf used to produce the tea or by the impact of different brewing techniques. No significant differences have been found when brewing green and black teas under similar conditions (Hicks et al., 1996), discrediting the theory that withering and fermentation have a significant impact on caffeine content (Sanderson, 1972).
Well, depending on what you drink there are articles about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658412
It depends on the tea you’re brewing, what you want to make with it, and your personal taste. How could there possibly be an objective answer?