How to make a proper cup of tea

A proper cup of tea, in the British sense, is a strong black tea — an English Breakfast blend, an Assam, a decent teabag — brewed with water at a full boil and drunk with milk. It is the simplest thing in this guide and the one most often done badly, usually by a kettle that was boiled an hour ago and a bag that was shown the water rather than left in it.

What you need

Fresh cold water, a strong black tea and, if you take it, fresh milk. One teabag or one teaspoon of loose leaf, about 2 grams, per cup. For a pot, the old rule of one spoon per person and one for the pot still holds, provided the pot is the size of an actual teapot.

The method

1. Fill the kettle with fresh water. Water that has been boiled once already has lost some of its dissolved air, and the cup tastes flatter for it. The Royal Society of Chemistry made a point of this in its 2003 method, and it costs nothing to follow.

2. Warm the pot or the mug. A splash of hot water swirled round and poured away. A cold pot takes several degrees off the water the moment it lands, and black tea wants all of them.

3. Pour on the water as it comes to the boil. Black tea is the one kind that wants water at, or very near, 100°C. That is what draws out the colour and the body.

4. Leave it for three to five minutes. Three for a lighter cup, five for one that will stand up to milk. A teabag needs the same time as loose leaf; the bag merely makes it easier to stop. Do not squeeze it — that is how the bitter end of the cup gets in.

5. Milk, if you take it. Enough to turn the tea a rich, warm brown rather than beige. Sugar is a private matter.

Milk first or milk last?

The argument is older than anyone reading this, and there are two respectable answers. The Royal Society of Chemistry's 2003 method put the milk in the cup first, on the reasoning that milk poured into hot tea heats unevenly and its proteins spoil, which tastes stale. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay on the subject, put the tea in first, so that the milk could be judged by eye. With a teabag in the mug there is no choice at all: the water has to go in first, or the tea never brews.

The international standard for tasting tea, ISO 3103, puts the milk in first as well, though it allows the other way: milk added afterwards does best, it says, when the tea has cooled to between 65 and 80°C. It is worth knowing what that standard is for. It exists so that tea tasters can compare teas fairly — two grams of tea to every 100 ml of boiling water, six minutes for black tea — not to tell anyone how to take their afternoon cup. Its British twin, BS 6008, won the British Standards Institution an Ig Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, which tells you how seriously the matter is taken.

When to drink it

The Royal Society of Chemistry put the ideal drinking temperature at 60 to 65°C, which in practice means a few minutes after pouring. Too hot to gulp, not so cool that it has given up. The tea calendar has the rest of the question — breakfast, elevenses and four o'clock — on your own clock.