How to brew a perfect cup of tea with loose tea, by Tea Taster Dominic Marriot

We have gone to a lot of effort to source high quality teas and it is really important, that you make the tea properly, to allow the flavour to come out. The first thing is that you should warm the teapot with hot water. This means that when you actually come to brew the tea, the cold teapot won’t cool the water too much, so the tea will then brew properly. So just give that a little swirl around, pour it away. Next you take our tea. We have our tea here in a nice tea caddy, that’s very important, because to store tea properly, you need to keep it airtight and away from moisture. You can add as much tea, as you want, that’s personal taste. The traditional measurement that we give is one teaspoon per person, and one extra spoon for the pot. So, I am going to make the tea for two people here, so I am going to put in three teaspoonfuls. The next stage which is very, very important is that when you use the water for your tea, you use fresh water. If you use water which you already boiled, a lot of the oxygen will have come out of it, so it won’t brew properly and the resulting tea will be very flat. So we are going to take some fresh water. So here in our tea tasting room, we have a special tap, which has filters and softeners on it. It is always better to use filtered water if possible, because that will remove any impurities, which will affect the taste of the tea. So let the water come to a rolling boil. It must reach boiling point - 100 degree celsius. You don’t want to over-boil it because, again if it over-boils, a lot of the oxygen will come out. OK, so the water is just starting to boil now. Most modern electric kettles tend to actually over boil the water. So, as soon as this will come up to a right level, (see it’s just starting to roll now) I am going to actually switch it off, so it doesn’t over-boil and I am going to pour that straight onto the tea. And I am also going to put the tea cosy over the top, just to keep that as warm as possible. You really need to give the tea a good amount of time, to allow the full flavour to come out. The colour will actually develop quite quickly, but the flavour will take longer, and we say for loose tea, the minimum time you must give the tea is 5 minutes. So now the tea had a good 5 minutes to properly brew, we are ready to drink it. Next thing we should do is give it a stir, just to mix it up a little bit. And then, we can pour it out into the cup. So now, it is really ready for you to drink – how ever you prefer; just drink it black like that, or with a touch of milk, lemon or sugar. That’s really up to you. So that’s really how to make the perfect cup of loose tea.