benhall.1 wrote:
Good Lord. There comes a limit even for a barbarian such as myself, and my tea sins are many (I won't list them, for I fear the flames). Not that they're born of ignorance: I'm simply a savage who knows how to do the right thing, but can easily switch gears when nobody's looking - sort of like sitting at the computer in your undies. Now, I'll begin with a disclaimer and admit that I have little problem with nuking a mug of water and dropping a tea bag in it, but that's where any similarity ends: everything else about that vid is totally unacceptable in my world.
Every time I hear the term "influencer" I cringe, and that woman is a prime example of why. She also gets a special spot in Hell for dragging her poor daughter into the offense.
When it comes to freshly-brewed tea, I'm a purist: no sugar, no lemon, and definitely no milk. I've given the milk thing a number of tries, but I just can't go there. I don't get the appeal; for me, milk ruins a perfectly good cup of tea. I never even owned one of those little wee creamer pitchers until I started gigging with a couple of Scots; hospitality required one for the times when we'd meet at my place. After all, milk straight out of a gallon jug is hard to manage, never mind being just crass. And I'm pleased to report that this Yank got compliments, along with with some surprise, at his ability to make a pot of "proper Scottish tea". Whatever that is. I just brew it, and Devil take the hindmost. Maybe that's the secret.
I've had to give up coffee (

) but I still keep two kinds of tea on hand, mainly in case guests drop in: Japanese green sencha (because brewing it doesn't require nearly as much coddling as gyokuro), and something black but respectable. Right now it's Scottish Breakfast, which I like as well as any other. The former is loose, the latter in bags of the same size as in the benighted video. Loose or bags, it doesn't matter too much to me. Well, I probably wouldn't buy bagged sencha unless there was no choice, but there you go.
benhall.1 wrote:
By the way, by this stage, British twitter has gone completely nuts over the video I posted at the top of the thread. One called it, "an outrage and a cultural assault on our British way of life". I actually think he wasn't joking ...
Probably not, but that's being way too sensitive. It would be quite sufficient to call the tea woman an oaf and a boor, and she should stop cluttering the bandwidth with her pig-ignorance and pawning it off as "knowledge". Anyone not living under a rock would know that no Brit would make tea even remotely that way. There's a Chinese saying: selling dog meat and calling it mutton.