I'm Bolivian! La Paz has a pretty strong tea-time culture, a lot of family visits are tea time events with pastries and empanadas and yucca cheese bread buns. I'm told our teatime and pastry is mostly from some old Austrian influence. Tea is usually mixed with some weak cinnamon which I actually find weird and don't like, but it is not unusual to drunk pure black tea, mostly in baggies. It's harder to get good quality loose leaf tea there it's a luxury treat and usually imported through friends who are traveling. Tea is usually served with a cloud of milk, maybe some sugar if you want, but some people prefer it pure. I don't see electric kettles and not every household has a microwave so water is usually heated with a kettle on the gas stove. Of course, we also have a lot of infusions we call mates (not the same as yerba mate, we call that Yerba mate in itself and is rarer, but within my social circle and class you are bound to find someone drinking Yerba mate), which are anis, cedrón, coca, hierba buena (lemon grass?), muña, and more. A particular favorite is the tri-mate, which is a blend of coca, anis, and cedrón. The infusions are generally not taken with milk, maybe with some sugar, but most people would find it weird. I personally really like all sorts of tea, and how I drink it depends on my mood. I sometimes have it with honey, but I usually vary between pure and a cloud of milk. My family loves the "Vienesse" blend, which is half earl grey and half Darjeeling, and goes really well with the milk. I like my loose leaf but sometimes it is just much more convenient or heaped to buy bags, though one of my actual expenses in college was loose leaf tea. I actually need to go buy some more here hmm maybe after finishing my current immigration thingy I can go buy some. I have ocasionally drunk tea with lime, but that is usually the delicious lime and honey mix for sore throats and colds and coming in from a cold rainy day. Tea is great. Tea is delicious. I am looking forwards to the tea drinking part of Limeño winter right now, since I don't really drink iced tea (I often find it too sweet!).
USian, and at my parents' house I use an electric kettle, but I don't have one in my apartment and use a Keurig with no flavor-cup to heat up the water instead. I'm pretty sure it's not as hot as it should be, but it's what I have, and it still tastes better than when I microwave it. Except Lemon Zinger tea, because those teabags don't have a string and sink, so I nuke the mug with water and the teabag in it for that, because then I end up with a cup of tea and not a cup of hot water with a layer of tea at the bottom that I have to stir up (I think it's because steam bubbles form in the teabag and lift it up). I've also got a tiny (2-cup) teapot with a built-in strainer thing for loose-leaf tea, and for that I boil the water in a pan on the stove. (I mostly drink chai with sugar and milk (even though it's not anywhere near as good when made from teabags), plus a few different herbal teas with nothing added.)
PA/USA here, and the only non-tea-drinker in a house of 6. Hot tea gets made by the cupful, mother has moves more to random herb infusions but whatever floats her boat [shrug] older bro heats water, adds teabag, steeps however long, adds milk, lemon and honey to taste. (No amount of honey is enough to drown out nasty tea flavor for me, sadly.) Iced/sweet tea gets brewed in a big 4-gallon pot. Add sugar while still hot, make sure sugar dissolves, stick the whole pot in the fridge and watch it vanish within a week.
not if you add a metric fuckton of sugar like my family does, plus it gets watered down with the ice which dilutes the bitterness i'm not a tea expert, idk why or what would make tea bitter
California and how I tea varies a lot. I like many kinds of tea and many ways of having it. Boba tea is great. Milk teas in general are great and lovely. Sweet tea is great and lovely. Masala chais are great and lovely and I like to make it myself at home with my own spice bases. Though most of the time when I am making tea for myself I just steep something and leave it entirely unfucked with. I love green teas the most though I've lately been on a massive Irish breakfast kick. Sometimes I stick milk and honey in my warm tea. I am also exceptionally fond of Syrian style tea. Basically a hot black tea that has had fuck tons of sugar mixed into it. You also add lots of fresh mint to it. Syrians know their tea. I will use tea bags but I am somewhat picky. I will not use premade masala chai tea bags for example. If I want that I am either going to go the whole nine yards and make it myself or get it made at a restaurant. The teabags taste incredibly fucking lame because they aren't nearly spicey enough. Also Lipton tea bags have precisely one use and that is cheap and frankly awful iced tea that has been so drowned in sugar it may as well be syrup. For making I tend to either use a stove top kettle or the dumb Kuerig thing when I am feeling lazy and don't care about burning my green leaves. Other times I like to boil my tea? It's a thing I picked up from making masala chai. Basically you just get a pot of water or milk boiling and then toss in the leaves. This burns the ever living fuck out of green teas. I do not care because I like the way those taste when they've been "fucked" up. I do like preparing the greens at their proper temperatures though. And with that I just get water to boiling and then let it sit off boil for a set amount of time. If I am feeling fancy I will pre-warm my cups so that my tea stays warmer longer. I use the Kuerig for that all the time because fuck it may as well use the thing to warm my cup. I never microwave my water. Something about that feels very wrong to me. I absolutely fucking hate a lot of American green iced teas. If ginseng and honey have been added to it I will not drink it. Tazo tea is basically hell on earth on that note. A lot of teas like that in general just kind of frustrate me. Things like peachy green tea just annoy me and I hate how they taste. Starbucks and its love of Tazo can fucking bite me. Give me a plain cup of tea or give me death. Though a lot of my hatred of the stuff is probably because a lot of the time I just want a plain cup of green tea and the only cafes I can find easily are Starbucks. Starbucks with their devil tea. Also @witchknights your comment about coffee makes me laugh. Because my coffee adoring friend from Texas says the same thing about Americano styled coffee. She's picky about the shit and apparently one day she went on a huge rant about coffee because someone mentioned Folgers in the chat.
Oh and once a year I like to spend a good chunk of money on tea from Teavana or something similarly fancy. I mean I've got the odd 100 dollars from Christmas or whatever so why the fuck not. The yearly fancy tea is a sort of ritual.
I'm Dutch, and I generally don't drink tea. But I am a giant anomaly :P At my parents' house tea is made in a giant teapot which holds 1,5 litres. My dad drinks his tea mostly back with maybe lemon sometimes. My mother drinks hers with milk, except when it's herbal or green tea, and my brother and sister drink basically half-and-half: half tea and half milk (soy in my sister's case).
im sacrilegious, i make tea one cup at a time by microwaving water in a teacup for ~2 minutes and then putting the tea bag in it (tho when we are making A Lot Of Tea here we do use a stovetop kettle) for black teas sometimes ill add a little evaporated milk and honey, never for anything else tho (ny/usa, for ref!)
I don't have a kettle at all, so I just boil water in a saucepan for tea, bc microwaving it is a good way to burn your hands off trying to take the mug out. plus I don't think most of our mugs can be microwaved. and I only drink it with honey (co/usa) an aside: my favorite mug to use for tea has both an advertisement for a gun shop, and a jesus fish. ~America~
Georgia-Alabama-Virginia-Texas-and-sometimes-Arkansas: Boil water in electric kettle, pour over teabag in mug, let steep for about two minutes, remove teabag and add milk. Sometimes sugar or honey. I don't drink much besides black and green tea. Also, we usually only have goat milk in the house, and sometimes that tastes icky if you heat it up, so I recently started putting half-and-half in my tea instead because it's store-bought-cow-product. This horrified my mother for some reason.
I drink it and I 100% agree with this assessment. But I'm also waaay too useless in the morning to do it properly (plus I'd have to buy a ton of spices), there's nowhere near my apartment or on my way to work I can get it that's decent, and I'm generally pretty damn thirsty when I get up, so I suffer with the tea bags. (Most coffee shops in my area use horrible powdered mixes that taste like faintly cinnamony and not-so-faintly sugary milk and those personally offend me. The only place in town I've found that does masala chai even remotely palatably and isn't a sit-down Indian restaurant is frigging Starbucks. Theirs is still way too sweet, but it at least has a kick.)
Tannins get stronger if you leave the tea steeping forever - getting strong tea without tannins mostly means using more tea to brew it with. Wisconsin, USA, from British Columbia, generally we drink looseleaf. When both of us want the same tea, heat water in electric kettle to appropriate temperature, pour over leaves in steeper thing in 1L pot, steep with a timer. When we want different teas or are on our way out, we'll use our travel mugs with built-in infusers or sometimes fill individual bags, then, again, heat water in electric kettle and pour over leaves. I take sugar in almost everything, and milk in black tea or puerh or rooibos.
In Iowa: My mom likes heavily sweetened coffee for her caffeine and unfucked-with herbal tea for relaxing in the cold months. The list of teas I won't drink is shorter than the list of teas I will drink, and what I do drink I always drink sweetened, and if black, with cream. I love a spicy chai latte. We use an electric kettle, but for a long time we just had a stovetop one or we had to use the microwave. For microwave, I pour the water over the tea bag AND THE SWEETENER before heating it up... and then leave the bag in there until the last drop has been drunk. Back when I lived in a housing co-op in Iowa City, I liked making "sun tea" in the house's big mason jars: pour warm water over whatever you're steeping, leave it on the counter for a while, then chill it in the fridge et voila. Serve with dinner in the summer. Worked well with hibiscus, I thought.
That's kind of what cold brewing is, although for 'true' sun tea, it should be in the sun - I guess the sun heats the water some and facilitates steeping. You don't actually need warm water or sunlight, though. Stick a bunch of teabags in a bunch of water (I usually go 10 bags to 2 liters of water), stick that in the fridge and leave it for 8 to 12 hours. Take the teabags out, and you've got iced tea.
-manitoba canada- i drink peppermint tea, and blackcurrant tea electric kettle, pour over teabag in mug, let steep 3 minutes, take out teabag, add milk (little less than 1/2) and 2 1/2 teaspoons sugar although i will try some teas, but they have to taste like something other than eating garden leaves or i wont drink it again
germany here -- unless im making iced tea (got the recipe from this forum and damn i can suddenly drink black tea again, hooray! whoever posted it, may your mind be ever sharp and your words hit their marks, may your game be on point and may your pencils never break), im using a kettle then, it depends on how much i wanna make, if not much i just put a tea bag in a mug and fill it, if i want more i use one of my tea pots with integrated strainer instead. ive got both loose leaf and bagged tea, and quite an assortment of granulate (fight me, turkish apple tea granulate is the best thing ever), and i tend not to sweeten my stuff case 3: im making apple tea from apples and spices, then i make it on the stove i cant drink anything with hibiscus in it, because it only tastes like hibiscus and hibiscus is disgusting, and sadly, 99% of all fruit teas here in germany have hibiscus in them. i really like peppermint and fennel tea, and i hope the mint im growing yields enough so i can brew it fresh. putting milk into tea is like mixing milk and water, and, why would you do that, thats horrible (lassi is an exception, because its savoury and spiced and a summer drink)
I feel this - I only do so with chai tea, because that already tastes like I'm drinking a cake, and I'd drink milk with a cake anyway, so the flavours work out there.
That is cultured butter; the cream has a bacterial culture added to it, a bit like yogurt. It makes for a slightly more acidic, tangier butter that's higher in butterfat and smoother. Most European butter is made that way; most American isn't.
USA/TN, I drink sweet tea almost exclusively. I put a ~10 tea bags in a pot, add a few cups of water, and let it steep. Then I add sugar and let it dissolve, then dilute it to the proper strength in a big plastic jug with ice and cold water. Always bagged Lipton or something cheap, never loose-leaf. A sweet and refreshing summer beverage on par with lemonade in popularity. The rare times I make hot tea, I just microwave the amount of water I want and drop the bag in, because it's not worth it to me to get out a pot to boil the water. I add an irresponsible amount of honey/sugar to it, too.
