Pay attention to the water quality, especially if you live in a hard-water area where minerals in the water will leave an ugly scum in your cup of tea. Always use a water filter, if you have one.
A nice trick is to use fresh water every time. Every time you reboil your water, you’re condensing the minerals that are naturally in existence in water. So when they cool down, they rise to the surface and give you that film on the top. If you only use the certain amount of water in your kettle, enough to fill up your cup, every time you’re using fresh water, you’re reducing the amount of limescale build-up in your kettle.
After paying attention to the quality of the water, the next question is how much tea (or how many tea bags) to use.
Kate provides some answers:
You should only use one level teaspoon of tea leaves per person – by adding more tea you will end up making the tea too strong and lose that original unique flavour of the tea. Effectively, you’re wasting tea.
And then what about leaving the lid on or off the pot while the tea is brewing?
Leaving the lid off allows for much more oxygen for the leaves while it’s being brewed.
Kate then recommends removing the teabags or tea leaves after 3 minutes … and save them to brew more tea later. They’re generally good for reusing 2 or 3 times.
But then be careful … (continued on the next page)