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No, of course we don’t microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.
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:(
You disgust me
Where’s throwing it into the harbor fall on this chart?
Far left
The USA was apparently built on communism.
A war was started because of that
Ok, but, why is microwaved water any different the water warmed in a kettle?
This seems like a pointless thing to get worked up over.
Went to see Randall doing his book promo and being interviewed by Matt Parker (in the UK) recently and this was his exact position on it
The audience were not on his side 😆
In my experience you won’t actually boil water in the microwave because it takes an eternity so you end up with tea in “warm” water instead. Or apparently some people also put the tea bag in the microwave ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Brother it takes 3 minutes to boil water in the microwave. I have done this without fail.
It cools down much faster though. Not sure how that works.
It doesn’t cool down faster. That makes no sense.
Listen I can’t prove it, but I swear on my mother it does
It may appear that way if it was unevenly heated, causing pockets of boiling water surrounded by comparatively cool water. This would make it look like it’s boiling, but then, when mixed, it is then much cooler than if heated by a kettle that relies on convection to mix the water.
You can prove it by boiling the water in different ways, putting a thermometer inside and then filming/timing it :D
Because only some of the water boils, not all of it.
My microwave must be really weak then. The kettle is still faster though
It definitely depends on the microwave. In my office, one boils a mug in 2:20, while the other requires over 3 min
Water warmed in a kettle has much more even temperature in all points, which affects the brewing process. Generally, the more even the temperature is, the more consistent and rich is your brew.
I would consider microwave boiling as a makeshift method to produce a mediocre result when you need it anyway, not as a daily driver.
How does a kettle warm the water more evenly but a microwave doesn’t? When a kettle has it’s heating element only at the bottom but a microwave blasts the entire mass of water with energy because it sits on a rotating plate.
Exactly because of that.
Hot water moves upwards, and if you heat it from the bottom, you get a more even result than if you blast it from all sides.
Cold water falls to the bottom of a kettle and boils on the bottom. Microwaves can miss the bottom, possibly?
Microwaves can miss the bottom, possibly?
Boiling water mixes itself, also: no
I’m asking this from a place of genuine ignorance: how does the evenness of the heat distribution matter when microwaving a pure liquid? I’m familiar with the microwave’s uneven heating qualities. I’m sure we’ve all bit into food that is scalding hot on the surface and still lukewarm at best in its interior. However, I’ve always presumed that is a product of microwaving a heterogenous, predominantly solid substance.
So, sure, the microwave applies heat unevenly to the water. But wouldn’t the tiny little bits of water which get “over” heated simply diffuse their excess thermal energy into the rest of the homogenous volume in very short order? Furthermore,wouldn’t an uneven heat distribution in a mug of water simply lead to convection currents flowing from hot to cold, therefore promoting a relatively even distribution?
The overheated particles will rapidly move upwards, which will lead to relatively even distribution in a layer, but uneven between heights.
In fact, in a large microwaved mug the difference between top and bottom can be as much as 6°C/11°F.
Using a kettle mitigates it for the most part, as it is the bottom that gets continuously heated, and the top is then naturally heated by the vertical currents of hot water, leading to a more even distribution.
Surely stirring the water in the microwaved mug and giving it another round easily solves this issue.
Ideally 2 to 3 rounds, yes.
But at that point, isn’t it easier to just buy a kettle? It doesn’t require such manipulations, costs next to nothing and allows you to rapidly boil up to 1,5-2L (0,4-0,5 gal) of water for all your needs.
There’s a good reason most of the (Western, at least, dk about other places) world uses them and considers them a basic piece of kitchenware.
In the US, kettles are supposedly much slower than a microwave or even a hob due to their grid.
Fair enough; but even then, American kettles can boil water at a very reasonable time (3 minutes for 1,5L?)
Still, I can understand how that extra minute alters the choice for many.
Microwaved water can sometimes explode after being disturbed by stirring or adding coffee/tea bag:
Could be a problem if you microwave it together with the tea bag.
Also I find microwaves to not heat up the water properly, leaving some cold spots.
Hard to believe that cold spots could stay for more than a moment with the Brownian motion.
Do you not add gelatin to your water before making tea?
Modified corn starch, miss me with those animal products (I actually am not vegan).
So give it a quick stir? Also if it’s at a boil, the bubbles are going to mix the fluid well.
The microwaves will heat your water more evenly than a kettle.
Liquids have this amazing property, that if you heat them , they auto-stir just by themselves.
(But personally, I’m uneasy about microwaving a tea bag with paper on one end, or worse, a staple. There’s probably no problem at all, but it doesn’t feel that way.)
How about someone who leaves the tea bag in the mug, sometimes for multiple days? Sips the tea with multiple bags still in it? It creeps me out and I am not even a big tea drinker.
What the fuck
Made me think of that eternal stew, but you instead add in more and more tea bags
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I once had a colleague who would get hysteric when someone would clean the coffee machine. People are weird. Not cleaning tea potts and even mugs is also quite common among elder germans. They argue it tastes better that way. (They drink the tea without sugar or milk, so it probably isn’t thaaat bad.)
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The fuck you mean sweetening the tea. Raw or bust for classic loose leaf undbroken tea brews.
Only for things like panning I would consider sweeting or low quality stuff specifically produced to do that.
But never add sugar to my gyokuro!
I’ve done that a few times. Mostly when the previous bag was used the night before, and I was super sleepy in the morning, so didn’t even bother ditching it, saving 1.3 seconds and thinking it would make my new tea stronger.
…yeah, I don’t do that anymore. But this is why I used to.
UPDATE: I just made my tea just the regular way this morning. While stirring, I realised I had left the previous night’s red berry tea bag in it. I didn’t want to waste an otherwise perfectly fine bag of Earl Grey, so I did it again. Not intentionally, though. Also, note to self: red berry Earl Grey is not great.
But sugar!!!
I’m an American who drinks tea. I’d love to hear from our distant countrymen on how accurate this is.
100% spot on. Microwaved tea is comparable I would say to microwaving a steak
The state of education is extremely depressing holy shit.
It’s foul. Cup of Tannin, more like.
… wait, there are some americans who put the tea BAG in the microwave with the water?!?
I’ve MADE tea using a microwave before and it was ALWAYS “heating the water in the microwave, then adding the teabag to the hot water”, it never even crossed my MIND to have the tea bag inside the microwave, and frankly that sounds AWFUL.
Maybe, who knows? Reheating tea though is absolutely foul. Worse than reheating coffee, somehow, and reheating coffee is pretty bad.
Why would you reheat tea in the first place? Just pour more boiling water in it.
Preaching meet choir.
Close enough to zero to be a rounding error, I’d bet.
I’m often on here telling stories if how evil my mother was, and now I know I can skip all the tedious rehashing of her many evil acts and just tell people she made tea by putting the tea bag in a mug of water and microwaving the whole thing.
I often do this. With loose leaf tea too. The quality of the result highly depends on the tea and whether you get the timing right. I know my microwave pretty well and can hit boiling or just before boiling by changing the time for a black vs a green tea.
When boiled appropriately, I can’t really tell the difference for most bagged teas, so maybe I’m just tea uncultured?
The earl grey loose leaf I have I actually like better when it’s kept boiling for longer (about 15 seconds of boiling), and the microwave allows me to easily do this.
The loose green tea I have changes its flavor a lot when heated for different amounts and to different temperatures. The microwave also let’s me easily control this in a way that I would struggle to with a kettle. I suppose I could add the tea afterwards and just get the water a bit hotter to compensate, but I’m lazy and I always forget about my tea in the microwave so it’s easier if it already has the leaves in it so I don’t have to re-steep
Aww fuck. Now that you put it that way, I get it.
For a start, you don’t make tea in a kettle, you boil the water in that, then either pour into a mug or a teapot
I refuse to believe that Randall doesn’t know how tea is actually made, so it has to be a meta-joke / troll.
That’s how I do it. Electric kettle. Glass.
Jokes on you, my kettle comes with a built in steeper, so I make my tea in the kettle!
Not British, but in my experience… accurate.
I mean, I’m also not British and am roughly aligned with this spectrum myself.
Look, if you can tolerate the absolute nonsense you hear from Americans about how to make coffee you can deal with me having a spice rack specifically to make tea.
What nonsense do you hear about making coffee?
Everyone has their own way, but there’s no wrong way.
I make coffee by drinking hot water, then chewing whole coffee beans and swallowing them. I then wash it down with milk.
Eh, chocolate-covered coffee beans aren’t bad, if they’re reasonably fresh. That’s not too different.
Really the only way you can do coffee wrong is if you boil it.
I got a free bag of those from the shop where I buy my coffee once. They’re really nice. I absentmindedly worked my way through the bag that afternoon, wondered why I was feeling so ill, and then realised I had consumed about two pots of coffee in pure bean form
The patriot in me smiles every time I microwave the water. Yankee Doodle, motherfuckers.
What does the burns unit do?
is it even on the chart when my water cooler at home has a hot spigot that dispenses water at just the right temperature for tea brewing? it’s basically like having a kettle that’s always ready…
I fucking love the water cooler heaters, mine does ice cold on one side and boiling on the other and it’s heavenly to have both immediately ready with water other than my horrifically heavy (and thus fuzzy) tap water
I got mine for less than $60 at Walmart like 5 years ago and it’s still going strong, highly recommend to anyone
In the neighboring State from where I live in Brazil, a lot of gas stations have publicly accessible hot water taps. Even some parks and plazas have them. It’s for the Mate drinkers to refill their Thermos.
Patrick Stewart once said American tea was one thing he would never get used to. “For a proper cup of tea the water must be boiling when it hits the leaves.” He really didn’t like being brought a carafe of somewhat hot water with a teabag next to it. Even as an American I can relate.
My husband is Northern German, close enough to England that he was horrified at the thought of making tea in the microwave. And he doesn’t even really drink tea when he’s not sick.
Austrian here and I too would never make tea in the microwave. (I too drink tea mostly when I am sick.)
Ha, my sister lives in Germany and the weirdest thing she finds about German tea habits is that they only drink tea in winter, which I guess is kind of on a par with being sick. In the UK tea is a constant but in Germany it seems to be more of a special circumstances thing (illness, cold weather…). Even the person my sister buys her tea from shuts up shop in the summer because there’s no market for it.
Tea is an inefficient delivery system for caffeine. If there’s no caffeine in it, it’s a warm beverage that relaxes you. So why would the industrious German worker bee want to bother with tea bags when coffee is right there? Unless of course the bee is sick and needs to relax, doctor’s orders, to get back to work as soon as possible. ;)
Proper good tea is way more expensive than coffee anyway. And buying inexpensive coffee (beans) can easily be masked by milk and sugar…
Loose leaf or bust! Keep the tea bagging to online shooters
Yeah the kettle is just for boiling the water, nobody makes tea in it, that would wreck it. Yes, I’m English.
Kettle boils the water, the TEAPOT steeps and serves the tea. Somehow people end up thinking they’re the same thing.
Not perfectly relevant, but I’ve always enjoyed Professor Elemental’s take on tea.
Do Americans make tea in a kettle? Teabag inside the kettle?
Surely putting tea inside a kettle would stain the kettle?
Apparently I’m committing all the tea sins. I definitely make tea in a kettle. But if I do that, I boil the water before adding the tea bags. Isn’t that pretty standard? I’d only do so if I’m making a lot of the same tea (or iced tea), usually for a group of people
For that there is a teapot. Some can be continuously heated up, just through external heating methods, such as a candle!
Making tea in a kettle severely decreases life of the kettle and even after washing, some amounts of aroma compounds will remain, affecting the taste and aroma of whatever you boil water for next
I think we may have different definitions of a kettle. I mean something like this:
Which you put on the stove. I can’t imagine that having tea in this is a problem at all. It’s just glass.
I’ve also done this with something like:
Which I could imagine keeping more of the taste/being a problem.
I assume you mean something like this by a kettle?:
Yes, I mean an electric kettle indeed, the last one
No problem brewing tea in glass, that’s how teapots work.
At my university time I had some student friends who brew loose tea in a kettle. Was kinda disgusting tbh.
So, where do I put my gaiwan on the spectrum?
For when you actually want 10 tiny cups of tea.
Rookie numbers! Try 20-50 tiny cups.
At some point you need to admit you’re just drinking brown water and not tea anymore.
If you run into that problem, you need more tea leaves. Also, puerh can produce an amazing amount of tea.
Yeah, depends on the tea too. I have some teas that are done after 3-4 steeps, and some that just never end.
