I’ve always really appreciated the rustic, zen look of traditional Japanese hagi-ware, but I never knew that its origins could actually be traced back to famous Korean potters abducted by Japan during a conquest. This is especially interesting to me as a Korean-American person. I really respect Japan’s aesthetic and cultural heritage, but I can’t ignore that Japan’s legacy in Korea is largely one of cruelty and exploitation. This seems to be just one example of that. And in fact, it wasn’t just the famous hagi-ware founders, Yi Sukwang and Yi Kyeong, who were abducted. Korean wares were well known and valued in imperial Japan, and a number of Korean ceramicists were taken during invasions to work in Japanese kilns. Similarly, when I visited Japan I found out that one of Japan’s most famous temples, Fushimi Imari, was founded by an influential Korean immigrant clan. However, the fact that the founding clan was from Baekje (Korea) is rarely acknowledged either. Considering that Japan has historically held imperialist/colonialist power over Korea, Japan taking credit for these accomplishments seems like erasure of a colonized nation’s achievement.
All in all, I’m really interested to learn more about Korean tea culture in the future…. it’s very exciting to see that Korea’s tea culture is just as impressive and influential as Japan’s.
If you’re unsure of what kind of tea infuser to get, here are some things you should consider:
1. What kind of tea am I going to brew?
2. How often am I going to drink tea?
3. Will I be using a teapot or a single-brew mug?
These are important questions because they affect the type of infuser you should buy. If you are prone to making small-grained teas (cheap breakfast teas, rooibos) you will need an infuser with a very fine mesh, to avoid pieces of tea falling out into your cup. Also, if you are going to drink high quality teas, you will want a wide-mouthed, basket-style infuser to allow your leaves to unfurl completely and release all their flavor. Tea balls, while cute and space-efficient, will make your tea taste noticeably blander because they do not let your tea leaves unfurl.
If you are not going to drink tea very often, or do not drink high quality teas, then maybe you are fine with a tea ball. Or, you might be eyeing a novelty shaped infuser - a manatee, a scuba diver, etc. If you don’t drink frequently, these are fine. However, I have heard that they are a pain to clean out due to their odd shapes, and you don’t want to mess about with mold or grime in a tea infuser (gross!). So if you will be using your infuser frequently, you’ll probably want to avoid the hassle of the fun infuser and again just go for a basket type.
If you are using a teapot, then you might not need an separate infuser at all. Teapots nowadays frequently come with built-in infuser baskets. Some people also prefer to just put the leaves directly in the pot (although I find this makes for pretty bitter tea if you make more than one serving at a time and let the leaves keep steeping). If you are using a teapot with no infuser, make sure to make only one serving of tea at a time to avoid bitter, oversteeped second servings. And again, if you’re using a single-brew mug, stick with the basket type!
TL;DR: get u a fine-meshed, wide-mouthed basket type infuser!! (:
This is a very common misconception that I encountered frequently in London, so I thought I'd write a little about it! (:
Afternoon tea was developed in 1840, after Anna Russell, the wife of the 7th Duke of Bedford, found herself growing hungry around midday. The current fashion at the time was to eat dinner rather late in the evening, so around 4 to 5 o clock, the Duchess ordered that she be brought a snack of some tea and cakes. She then began to invite her friends over to join her for these snacks, and so the trend of the "afternoon tea" spread quickly amongst the upper class. It was a chance for hostesses to socialize, show hospitality, and show off their fine china teaware. Afternoon tea was always served at the low tea-table, or taken whilst sitting in low, comfortable chairs, so it is, to this day, also known as "low tea".Eventually, the ritual of afternoon tea became highly codified. Today, afternoon tea is usually served somewhere between 12 to 5 o clock, and consists of a three-tier service of scones (with clotted cream and jam), finger sandwiches, and assorted cakes/pastries, with a pot of tea.
High tea, on the other hand developed out of the meals of lower class citizens. After coming back from work in the evenings, working class people would enjoy a humble mug of tea and savory dishes of meat, bread, vegetables, and cheese. It was essentially equivalent to the modern day dinner. In time, this commoner's meal became known as "high tea". This is counterintuitive, given the connotations of the word "high", but the "high" in high tea actually refers to the high dinner table at which the meal was served (in opposition to the "low" tea table). However, high tea has also become greatly codified over time, and having high tea is now a treat instead of a common occurrence. At high tea, dishes such as welsh rarebit, smoked salmon, meat pies, and fish are served along with tea.
For those who are interested: my final research paper for my Atmospheres of London class on how women are responsible for the popularity of tea in England today, under the cut!
When one thinks of the typical stereotypes connected with British people, few come to mind quicker than tea. Tea to the British is a major part of the cultural identity. Across Britain, over 165 million cups of tea are drunk daily, versus 70 million cups of coffee (“Tea Glossary and FAQs”). Furthermore, British people have drunk tea for over 400 years, and over time, uniquely British customs and rituals of tea drinking have developed. Anyone who is aware of British tea culture may come to wonder how tea gained its status in British society today. Interestingly enough, the popularity of tea in Britain in modern times is largely due to the intervention of women throughout the past few centuries. The following paper will trace the involvement of women in the spread of tea throughout Britain by splitting it into three periods. The first section will discuss tea’s initial popularity in Britain via aristocratic women; the second section will explore tea’s eventual boom amidst the upper and middle class, and how women of these classes served to create and spread tea culture amongst all members of their class; and the third section will explain how tea eventually reached the women of the lower working class and how they spread it to other men, thus completing tea’s pervasion in all levels of British society, the accomplishment of which eventually led to tea’s celebrated position in Britain today.
Before beginning to speak on these points, it is important to establish some initial context on the status of tea in Britain at the time. Even before tea originally began to gain mass traction in 1662, tea was to be found in coffeehouses around the nation. It was first brought to Britain by the Dutch, who were in contact with China via the Dutch East India Trading Company. The Dutch brought tea over to Europe in 1610 as a novelty drink that was both exotic and medicinal. After tea’s first arrival in Europe, it gained popularity in other nations due to its healthful properties. In Europe, “[tea] was thought to cure everything from gout to old age” (Guerty, 57). However, tea did not arrive in Britain until several decades after 1610. The first recorded incidence of the sale of tea within Britain was in the coffeehouse of Thomas Garway. Diarist accounts relate that “Garway later claimed that ‘that it was he who ‘about the yeer 1657….first publiquely sold the said Tay’” (Ellis, ix). Tea is also briefly mentioned in the diary of Samuel Pepys. In an entry from the year 1660, he mentions that during a visit to a coffeehouse, he encounters “a cupp of tee (a China drink of which I had never drank before)” (Guerty, 57). However, beyond these two incidences, it is difficult to find any written accounts of tea by laypeople in Britain before 1662. This is demonstrative of the state of tea at the time. While it was available for sale in coffeehouses, it was generally seen as something to be drunk to cure head colds or something to be ingested as a rare curiosity. It was not generally trusted nor accepted, as “[Tea’s] […] strangeness and foreign origin excited curiosity and distrust.” (Ellis, ix)
In 1662, this situation changed entirely due to the introduction of Catherine of Braganza to the English court. A princess from Portugal, Catherine married King Charles II in 1662. At the time, tea was already quite popular in Portugal, and Catherine herself was quite a tea-lover. Moreover, part of her dowry in her marriage to King Charles II was 4 pounds of tea (Farrel, 51). Tea rapidly went from being a medicinal drink to the drink of royalty. For example, in a poem written by Edmund Waller in honor of Catherine’s birthday in 1663, tea is mentioned in the final lines of the poem. He writes, “The Muse's friend, tea does our fancy aid,/Regress those vapours which the head invade,/And keep the palace of the soul serene,/Fit on her birthday to salute the Queen” (Ellis, xii). In writing this poem, “Waller publicly linked the drinking of tea to the Queen, thereby promoting its status as both a definitively British and feminine activity” (Kowaleski, 131). From that point on, tea was the drink of royalty.
As soon as the queen set the fashion of drinking tea, the ladies of the court were intrigued. In fact, “Almost from the moment of its first arrival in England, tea was linked with fashionability” (Guerty, 1). Seeking to emulate the queen, aristocratic women attempted to buy tea, but were largely deterred by the rarity and price of tea in England. The spread of tea might thus have been halted were it not for two women of the court who carried on the tea trend. These were the wives of the Earls of Arlington and Ossory. The two women, who were both Dutch, were in danger of being ostracized by the court since England was at war with the Dutch at the time. Yet, they used the newfound popularity of tea to leverage their position at the court. While their husbands were on a diplomatic trip at the Hague, the wives ordered them to return with a parcel of tea. When their husbands returned with the desired goods, the women began to hold elaborate tea parties, which made them, and tea, hugely popular in Whitehall (Ellis, xii).
With the advent of the tea parties, the tea craze fully broke out amidst the court. Demand for tea from the court was high, and traders began to become eager to capitalize on it as soon as possible. Thus, the availability of tea increased somewhat, making it available
to most of the women of the court. While it remained a luxury, “tea had great appeal to the fashionable world of the time, notably the court. Elaborate tea parties were given by the wives of courtiers after the most elegant continental manner” (Farrel, 51). It is important to note that it was the wives of the courtiers who hosted the parties, rather than the men. While male courtiers also drank tea at tea parties, they were not the initiators nor propagators of the tea movement. It was largely due to women, and their desires to follow the fashions of the time, that caused tea-drinking to become widespread amongst the aristocracy.
The spread of tea to the upper and middle classes was different from its spread amongst the aristocracy. The attraction was not purely inspired by the desire to imitate the fashions of one’s betters. A large part of upper and middle class women’s attraction to tea was its ability to create a space for women’s social lives, as well as its potential for creating a domain in which women had authority and dominance.
For context, the aforementioned coffeehouses that served tea were strictly male establishments. Known as “penny universities”, these coffeehouses were gathering places for men of all classes to come and converse on all manners of topics, over cups of coffee. Coffee was seen as a man’s drink, as it was robust and invigorating to the mind. Women, who were generally seen as more frail and delicate, were not allowed to partake of this drink, nor come into the rowdy, loud coffeehouses. Because of this, tea became a woman’s drink. Beyond being associated with feminine and gentility, tea was milder and more healthful than coffee. Thus, it was acceptable for women to drink it.
The availability of tea continued to increase, as more and more traders began to get into the tea business. As a result, “as goods became more easily available during the eighteenth century, what is known as the consumer society, began to develop. […] Imitation of one’s better became easier, as more goods poured into England to the increased overseas trade, and therefore, more money was to be found in the tradesmen’s pocket” (Farrell, 54). A market for tea began to open. The first tea shop opened in 1717, when Thomas Twining, who also owned Tom’s Coffee House, decided to build a tea shop adjacent to his coffeehouse. The tea shop was a designed to “cater for ladies of fashion. It allowed women to mix shopping and socializing” (Suter, 109). This was a novelty for many high-class women, who were not used to meeting with their friends outside their homes. Twinings Tea soon became a huge success.
However, Twinings was not popular only because it functioned as a meeting place. The actual tea it sold was also flying off the shelves. Tea could be made easily at home, as it requires only leaves, boiling water, and a teapot to make. Thus, any woman who developed a taste for tea and wanted to entertain herself with it at home could easily buy some and prepare it herself. Thus not only did the creation of Twinings allow women to enjoy tea and social life outside their homes, it also gave them something that empowered them within the domestic sphere. Women became in sole control over tea culture in the home. For example, ladies of the house were in control of tea caddies. Even with the growing market, tea was still exorbitantly expensive. According to Ellis, ““The coffee-man William Elford […] [offered] coffee at between twenty pence and six shillings the pound, depending on the quality of the beans […] Tea, by contrast, was priced at commodity” (Ellis, xi-xii). Because of this, tea had to be kept under close guard. Women became the guardians of tea, keeping the leaves safely under lock and key in special boxes called tea caddies. And beyond the practical use of keeping thieves out, “keeping tea locked up gave it perhaps even more social value, thus leading the way to ceremony” (Farrell, 54). The head lady of the household was, in addition, responsible for blending and preparing the tea. If anyone wanted to have tea, they would have to consult the lady of the house. For women, “hosting (tea) was considered a high honor and gave women a small sense of empowerment in a world designed against female advancement” (Heath, 8). In households that did not have a lady at its head, a special maid known as a “blender” had to be hired (Farrell, 54). In this way, women began to claim a leadership role in manners pertaining to tea, and thus tea became even more closely linked to femininity and domesticity.
Due to tea’s close associations with womanhood, it is initially difficult to comprehend how tea could spread to upper and middle class men. However, looking at some of the social mores surrounding men and women’s socializing explains this phenomenon. Men had many options in terms of their social life. They could go most anywhere to meet other men, and coffeehouses in particular were useful for this. After meals, they could also retire to another room to drink wine together. Women were excluded from these things, as both coffee and wine were seen as far too robust and masculine for delicate women to partake of. These drinks “had come to be associated with the sparkling wit and the masculine concerns of the outside world; tea, with the home and more intimate chatter” (Farrell, 117). One of the only social pleasures available to women became the tea table, to which women would retire after meals or in the evenings. There, the women could make polite conversation whilst drinking tea and playing cards. This activity, which began as casual social gathering, eventually grew into a highly codified activity. Etiquette had to be followed, and there were strict rules about what the conversation could or could not address. True ladies avoided ‘scandal, disclosing secrets, [and] duplicity.’ Above all else, women were never to discuss anything that appeared ‘distasteful to the lady of the house.’ This left women with only innocent subjects such as literature or music” (Heath, 7). Because serious or intellectual issues were usually not considered polite to discuss at tea, male writers began to be “associated with the frivolous gossip of elegant women, as amply put forth by Pope, Wycherley, Swift, and Congreve” (Farell, 151).
Yet, however scathing male authors were about the frivolity of the tea table, they soon began to long for the refinement and calm sophistication of it themselves. Coffeehouses were rather boisterous, and “The tea table [afforded] the opportunity for a respite from the “brutish” side of manhood.” (Kowaleski, 134). Ellis similarly states that “the dominant historiographical model of the tea-table suggests that tea ‘represented the domestic and feminine interests in contrast to those associated with the “coffeehouse”’, which are public and masculine […] Women and tea are both a cure for the libertine excesses of male sociability, characterized by bravado, boasting, drunkenness and violence.” (Ellis, xxi-xxii). Thus, men began to join women at the tea table as well. In the mid 18th century, “tea drinking had already been a woman’s domain often ridiculized by the satire of the eighteenth-century male […] However, men who enjoyed women’s company, also drank tea with them” (Farrell, 148). Farrell goes on to claim that “tea [took] on the function of an excuse, a prop for a friendly visit among men as well as in mixed company” (152).
The spread of tea from women to men was further augmented by the creation of pleasure gardens, also known as tea gardens. The most famous of these was Vauxhall Tea Gardens, which no longer exist, having gone out of fashion in the middle of the 18th century (Farrell, 55-56). These gardens were gathering places for both men and women. Whole families could come to the garden and enjoy tea and light snacks, as well as live music and entertainers. Ultimately, “tea gardens developed, as venues for family affairs, as outings, excursions and as something elegant as well. The harsh, exciting and nosy coffee-house atmosphere had slowly given way to a more refined setting for a more delicate drink.” (Farrell, 54). In this way, what had previously been a trend exclusive to women was also co-opted by men and became acceptable for all to drink. This was what allowed tea to ultimately beat out coffee in popularity. Coffee had been exclusive, and that limited its potential to spread. Tea became “ a universal beverage by extending to the feminine part of the community” (Farrell, 52). Women universalized tea and compounded its popularity amongst the upper and middle classes.
With the aristocracy, upper class, and middle class conquered, tea had only to permeate the lower class to become the staple drink of society. Up until mid 1700s, the price of tea was a major deterrent. It remained a luxury item, and thus the lower classes continued to subsist mostly on ales and gin. But the market economy soon took care of that issue. Tea trade was growing so remarkably fast that “by 1785 […] there were about 30,000 registered tea merchants in Britain” (Farrell, 58). Yearly nationwide consumption of tea went from “800,000 lb in 1710 to more than 1,000,000 lb in 1721. By 1757 it had reached 4,000,000 and the consumption rose steadily year by year” (Farrell, 56). Smuggling subsequently became rampant. The amount of tea smuggled in in the following years ranged between 4 and 7.5 million pounds (Forrest, 23). Eventually, so much tea was smuggled in that people ceased buying legal, taxed tea, and tea trading companies faced a huge deficit. The Dutch East India Trading company lobbied for a reduction in tea tax, and the resultant passing of The Commutation Act of 1784 significantly brought down the price of tea. As a result, tea sales skyrocketed (Forrest, 25). However, the lower class people’s buying of tea was not just motivated by the imitation of superior classes, as in the sections above. Certainly there was some fascination with the gentility of the drink, but largely, tea became popular amongst working class women for practical reasons. The first was economic. Again, tea was easy to prepare, and it did not take too much leaf to make. One pound of tea produced about 200 cups of tea, while one pound of coffee beans gave only 40 cups of coffee (Farrell, 52). Thus, although still not as cheap as stouts and ales, tea became a relatively affordable alternative to these more robust drinks. Furthermore, since the water needed to prepare it was boiled, it was free of most dangerous bacteria. So many women gave children tea for their health (Farrell, 53).
Up until this point, lower class men still preferred public houses where they could gather after work and drink alcohol (Suter, 109). Thus, the final step to making tea acceptable for all classes and genders was through the prevalence of the temperance movement, which became quite powerful from the 1830’s onwards. Drinking alcohol became aligned not only with sin, but also with waste and disrespectability. Those who believed in temperance maligned those who spent their wages on gin and beer, since they believed such spending promoted a cycle of poverty. Followers of temperance promoted tea, claiming that “by saving what was wasted on alcohol, estimated in 1867 at around a quarter of working class earnings, temperance would raise the standards of the masses to respectability and contentment” (Burnett, 63). Tea, as an alternative to alcohol, was celebrated as “The cup that cheers but not inebriates”, and followers of the movement claimed that it would “rescue men from the alehouse and women from the gin palace, (and) would preserve the family and restore domestic comfort” (Burnett, 63). As a result of the popularity of the temperance movement, women began to exhort their husbands to come drink tea at home rather than go off to the pubs. Under pressure from their wives, and developing a taste for tea themselves, men increasingly chose tea as their beverage of choice.
By the early 1800s, tea had spread amongst all classes and genders. It was the universal beverage that united all of England. Simultaneously elegant and homely, comforting, and invigorating, it had many benefits which made it extremely popular. Once the beverage of kings and queens, it soon turned into a staple of life, a cheap everyday luxury that could always be relied on. And every step of the way, it was women who continually pushed tea forward. Aristocratic women popularized court tea parties and set a general fashion. Upper and middle class women developed a social culture of tea at tea-tables, even within the confines of their domestic roles, and men gradually came to enjoy the tea-table as well. And finally, in their efforts to run efficient and respectable households, lower class women made tea popular amongst the family unit for reasons of health and economy. It is unfortunate that nowadays, with tea being as taken for granted as it is in Britain, that women’s contributions to tea culture are so easily forgotten. It is a general trend in history to erase women’s involvement in many issues of the period, and the case of tea appears to be no exception. Perhaps, even through something as seemingly small as remembering the important role women played in creating the institution of British tea, people of this generation can make a step towards reconstituting women into their rightful places in history.
Works Cited
Burnett, John. Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Ellis, Markman. Tea and the Tea-table in Eighteenth-century England. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010. Print.
Farrell, Mary E. From Cha to Tea: A Study of the Influence of Tea Drinking on British Culture-- a Mini-anthology of British Literature from 1660. Castelló De La Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 2002. Print.
Forrest, Denys Mostyn. Tea for the British: the social and economic history of a famous trade [by] Denys Forrest, Chatto and Windus, London, 1973. Print.
Guerty, P. M., Switaj, Kevin, “Tea, Porcelain, and Sugar in the British Atlantic World”, OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 18, No. 3, The Atlantic World (Apr., 2004), pp. 56-59
Heath, Mary E. "A Woman’s World: How Afternoon Tea Defined and Hindered Victorian Middle Class Women." Constructing the Past 13.1 (2012): 1.
Kowaleski-Wallace, Beth. "Tea, Gender, and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century England." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23.1 (1994): 131-145.
Suter, Keith. "The Rise and Fall of English Coffee Houses." Contemporary Review 286.1669 (2005): 107-110.
"Tea Glossary and FAQ's." UK Tea & Infusions Association. UK Tea & Infusions Association, 2014. Web. 03 Dec. 2014.
Waller, Edmund, and Percival Stockdale. The Works of Edmund Waller, Esq. in Verse and Prose: To Which Is Prefixed the Life of the Author. London: Printed for T. Davies, 1772. Print.
"Rite for Making A Real English Cuppa Tea" by Reverend Harold Wilson
Since I am leaving London soon, I thought I'd share this recipe for making proper English tea that I've found in the course of my tea research. (Yes, my final research paper is about tea, because of course it is.) Personally, I disagree with what he says about putting the milk in first, but that's a highly contested debate.
RITE FOR MAKING A REAL ENGLISH CUPPA TEA
Fully boil water (preferably in English teakettle with spout) so that water hits the tea at maximum temperature.
Warm teapot with near-boiling water, and pour away.
Measure loose tea leaves (kept in tea caddy tin) 1 1/2 large teaspoons for first two cups, 1/2 per cup thereafter.
Leave to brew 2 minutes; stir; leave one minute more.
Pour very small quantity of milk into cup (before the tea; it makes a subtle difference). Best milk is bottled, as little creamy as possible.
Pour in the tea, leaving room to adjust strength to taste with extra hot water.
Stir in the milk. (Should be strong milk-chocolate colour, not pale and anaemic).
If served without milk, requires diluting. Add sugar to taste.
Keep pot warm with tea-cosy (knitted hat with earholes and pom-pom in gay colours) ready for the second cup.
Best results obtained about 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
By the Revd. Harold Wilson, Chaplain, (Yes, please, Barcelona, 1973:5)
Pu-erh tea is unique amongst teas for aging like wine: good pu-erhs will develop a richer taste and increase in value as they age, up to about 25 years. Because of this, in China, there soon grew a trend of investing in pu-erh. Some people went so far as to say that investing in pu-erh was better than investing in gold. There are several famous stories of people who made fortunes out of pu-erh, but perhaps the most famous is the story of the 88 Raw Cake (aka 88 Qing Bing).
The 88 Raw Cakes began as a batch of raw pu-erh from Menghai, a region which produces large amounts of pu-erh. At that time, the taste of raw pu-erh was unpopular, so the seller was desperate to get these cakes off of his hands. However, one tea retailer, tea master Vesper Chan, recognized that this batch of pu-erh had great potential. He bought several tons of these cakes, and chose to age them in dry storage. (Most pu-erhs are stored in a humid environment to speed up the aging process, but this weakens the pu-erh's taste.) He bought out the 10th floor of a high-rise building, and stored the cakes there. Over the years, the quality of the tea improved markedly, as did its price. In 1992, when Master Chan bought these cakes, the price of one cake was $1.00 USD. The value increased like so:
1992 - $1.00 USD
1993 - $9.00 USD
2003 - $49.00 USD
2005 - $154.00 USD
2012 - $6,154.00 USD
Even now, you can still sometimes find a few cakes of 88 Raw Cake at pu-erh auctions, selling for thousands of dollars.
This story and others like it led many to invest in pu-erh. As demand rose, prices skyrocketed. Some people made a great deal of money, but even more people suffered heavy losses. Most people did not know how to properly store their tea, so the quality did not increase much. Some did not know what tea to buy, and blindly bought low-quality pu-erh. Still others were cheated into buying fake high-quality pu-erhs. The mania finally came to a head in 2007, when the pu-erh market crashed.
Since then, pu-erh has bounced back. 2013 saw pu-erh prices rise by 30-100%. Once again, the tea cakes have become a popular investment.
Here are some tips if you hope to invest in pu-erh:
1. Buy high quality pu-erh that is either from arbor trees or ancient arbor trees.
2. Buy the tea in early spring or mid-spring for the freshest leaves.
3. Avoid buying tea from the most famous regions like Lao Banzhang - these teas have peaked in price and will not appreciate much more. Buy less famous teas so there is room for the price to grow.
4. Buy tea that has a strong "gan" quality - a rich mouthfeel, with a thick, nuanced broth
5. Avoid overly-bitter tea - raw pu-erh that is a little bitter at first is okay, because with time the bitterness will mellow out into sweetness. Overly bitter tea will not mellow.
Sun tea is a new craze in tea-brewing. It's an efficient, delicious new way to brew tea - simply leave tea and distilled water in a pitcher out in the sun, and let time and the sun's rays do the rest of the work! Sun tea is also great iced, so it's the perfect way to make the most of the summer's heat.
BUT!
Sun tea can also be dangerous for your health!
Even if you use filtered water, there may still be bacteria in the water, in the pitcher/jar or even on the tea/teabags. And because sun tea does not reach boiling temperatures during its brewing process, any bacteria in the sun tea will remain alive, and might even proliferate.
For most caffeinated teas, the caffeine in the tea will prevent the bacteria from growing for a few hours. But if you brew your sun teas for more than 2-3 hours, you put yourself at risk for getting sick! And if you are brewing sun tea with an herbal tea, which contains no caffeine, you do not even have the 2-3 hour safety window. I have seen many recipes recommending about a 5 hour brewing time, but in terms of bacteria growth, that could be dangerous.
To be safer, here are some steps to take before you brew your sun tea:
1. Sterilize your pitcher very well - and make sure to wash all parts of it!
2. Refrigerate your tea as soon as it is done brewing.
3. Don't leave your tea out for more than 3-4 hours.
4. If your tea is cloudy or thick, throw it out! Those cloudy bits are bacteria colonies.
I wrote about a safer alternative to sun tea here (:
CDC report on Sun Tea: http://www.maricopa.gov/envsvc/AboutUs/pdf/Iced%20Tea.pdf
Snopes, from which I got most of my information: http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/suntea.asp
My roommate and I were discussing buying a kettle for our apartment when the question of the difference between teapots and kettles came up. For those who don't know, kettles are specialized vessels in which one boils water. Teapots, on the other hand, are used only to steep and serve tea. That means one can not/should not boil water in a teapot.
While it is technically possible to boil water in your teapot, especially in the case of teapots of hardier design, it is still dangerous. Glass or thin-walled ceramic teapots might explode (or at least, crack) when heated directly on the stove. Some cast iron teapots and thick-walled ceramic pots will probably survive the stovetop, but they will almost definitely suffer damage. Which is not what you want for your nice teapot!
One of the problems is, kettles and teapots often look quite similar. They are both rotund and feature similar spouts and handles. However, there are some key differences. Kettles are usually metal, while teapots are made of more delicate material. Also, kettles are generally larger than your average teapot (made to boil bulk amounts of water at once). There are also multiple types of easily recognizable kettles. One common type today is the electric kettle. Another kind of kettle, more prevalent Eastern Europe and the Middle East, is the samovar, a large, urn-shaped kettle.
So the kettle is purely for boiling water in; in that case, how should one treat the teapot? Teapots are made to handle heated water, but not to heat water in. What one should do is, once the water is boiled, use a small amount of boiling water to pre-heat the teapot. Swill the boiling water around in the pot. Then dump it out, and then proceed to steep your tea in the pot with appropriate amounts of tea and water. Pre-heating the pot prevents the boiling water from cooling once it hits the cold teapot, ensuring that your tea brews at the right temperature. It's also just less stress for your teapot: some teapots are more delicate, and sudden changes in temperature might crack them.
