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Yesterday we talked pie. Today we’ll talk tea.

I come by my love of tea honestly, heck, it’s probably coded in my DNA. It is all that Scots and Welsh blood flowing through the veins. Even the wee beasties developed a love of tea at an early age. Nothing beats a cold morning like a warm cuppa.

Do you enjoy tea?

To brew that perfect pot of tea:

It’s easy. Even if you use :shudder: a tea bag. LOL, no I’m not that bad. Close 😉

  1. The kettle is what you boil the water in. The pot is what you steep the tea in, then pour from.
  2. To properly prepare the teapot, you want to fill it with hot (as hot as you can get from your tap) water, to warm the teapot, while you boil the water.
  3. Heat water to appropriate temperature in a tea kettle. Teas steep at slightly different temperatures. A White or Green tea at about 175 degrees; a Black or Oolong tea at 195 degrees; and an Herbal at around 200 degrees.
  4. If you aren’t using tea bags, you’ll want to have a steeping ball or strainer basket/infuser for your teapot. Don’t worry if you don’t have a strainer basket or steeping ball, you can use a hand-held strainer as you pour to remove the leaves (unless you plan to read the leaves but that’s a whole other post).
  5. Measure out your tea. On average, you need 1 to 1.5 teaspoons of loose tea per 8 oz of water. If you’re making an entire pot, don’t forget to add a teaspoon for the pot. (Remove the warming water before adding the tea.)
  6. Pour the hot water in your teapot and steep for the recommended steep time.
  7. Longer brewing does not equal stronger tea…just bitter tea. If you want a stronger tea add more tea. Teas steep for slightly different lengths of time to avoid bitterness. (Yes, I have the secret.) A Green or flavored White only needs about a minute. Black or Oolong need 2 to 3 minutes. A non-flavored white or herbal need 4 to 5 minutes.
  8. And if you want to get fancy you can cover your teapot in a tea cozy, or place on a teapot warmer, to help keep the tea warmer longer.

How you drink your tea is up to you. A little lemon. A little honey. A little milk or cream. A little sugar. Some combo?

Now, don’t you just want to curl up with a slice of yesterday’s Apple Pie and a cuppa tea?

Believe it or not, brewing a cuppa was not the original plan for this post. This Tea Towel was.

I grew up with a very English Nana, Grandpa’s second wife, and despite what I said at the beginning of this post I owe my love of tea to them. My parents are coffee drinkers through and through, only breaking out the teapot when Grandpa and Nana came to visit. Nana’s kitchen displayed a number of printed Tea Towels. Some she’d picked up before WWII. Decorated Tea Towels and England just go together in my mind. All because of Nana.

But I’d never owned one. Strange when I think about it. I was in London and surrounding areas, yet failed to pick up one as a souvenir.

Then my beautiful mother-in-law sent me this one! Aw, she knows me so well 🙂

It is now hanging above my desk. I look at it and smile. I smile for my Scottish ancestry. I smile for the memories a printed Tea Towel invokes.

Curling my fingers around a warm cup of tea and listening to stories from another generation’s childhood/young adulthood. Grandpa’s cherry tobacco as he puffs away on his pipe. Nana puttering around in the kitchen, canning the best Pickled Beets and Bread-n-Butter Pickles from the veggies Grandpa grew in the garden. Gathered around their kitchen table, staying up late, so they could teach me how to play Bridge, a skill sadly gone rusty since they passed. I owe my teapot collection to Nana too, but perhaps that is a post for another day 🙂