Douglas, Thank You for the Perfect Cup of Tea

This morning I had the chance to promote two things I am excessively fond of: Tea and Douglas Adams. I have an electric kettle at work so that I can make my own hot fresh tea each morning. Tea is my saving grace. It makes sitting in my cubicle in the black, gray, and white land of vogonity seem slightly less intolerable. As I was sitting and enjoying my morning cup of tea, a coworker came by with a sad look on her face and said that her tea never tasted as good as when Starbucks made it, and she couldn’t understand how I could enjoy mine so much. I promptly took her to the kitchen, showed her how to use my electric kettle, and made her read a little-known but highly useful article written by Douglas Adams while the water boiled.

Her life was changed forever.

I am ridiculously fond of tea. But it wasn’t always so. Until February 2000, I thought it a very nasty drink that only boring grown-ups drank iced while sitting around talking about how their bodies aren’t working as well as they used to. In February 2000, I was at a cafe in Kensington (a neighborhood on the west side of Central London) with my human acquaintances. One of them, of course, ordered a cup of tea and I turned up my American nose and took several pulls of my Coke just to banish the mere thought of that nasty British substance hitting my taste buds. (This was before I realized that soda is in fact Liquid Satan and has no business entering anybody’s digestive tract.)

“How do you know you don’t like tea?” I was challenged.

“Because it tastes like butt,” came my eloquent and succinct reply.

“It does not.”

“It does too. Besides, if it tasted so wonderful, Samuel Adams and his friends wouldn’t have dumped an entire boatload of it into Boston Harbor.”

“You are basing your assessment of the flavour of tea on the opinion of a pack of grown men wearing loincloths and war paint committing an act of vandalism?”

Touché.

We quickly resorted to sullenly sipping our caffeinated beverages of choice and glaring at one another. But because we were in England, we smoothed it over by politely changing the subject to the weather and the condition of the sidewalk and flagrantly ignoring the fact that we were both quite irritated. However, once we started walking home, my companion insisted that we stop at the Marks and Spencer.

“For what?”

“You’ll see.”

She went straight to the enormous wall of tea that is in every Marks and Spencer and grabbed two packets of Twinings Tea: Earl Grey and Lady Grey. She made me hold them while we stood in line at the till. I examined the package. Apparently Thomas Twining opened the first tea room in London on the Strand in 1706. The shop is still there.

1706. 1776. London has a tea shop that is seventy years older than the United States. A tea shop. The looks of incredulity I got when describing the greatly advanced age of buildings in Los Angeles suddenly began to make sense. It occurred to me that European smugness about tradition might be just a teensy bit justified.

We went home, and my friend accessed H2G2, a website started by Douglas Adams as a lighthearted but useful compendium of all knowledge. The internet, it seems, has made The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a feasible reality. She directed me to an entry made by Adams nearly a year previous, and made me read it while she put the kettle on. It was entitled Tea. By the time I got to the words “most Americans HAVE NEVER HAD A GOOD CUP OF TEA” I finally understood what was happening.

I sullenly decided to see this through, and I would prove once and for all that tea was a very nasty drink, one meant only for people whose teeth were already so crooked that they wouldn’t mind if they were stained brown as well. So I watched as she carefully followed every step Adams describes. It’s like a ballet. The kettle on the fire. The swirling of the teapot to warm it up. The soft sound of the tea bags hitting the bottom of the kettle. And the nearly invisible swirls of steam that rise from the spout.

And the heavenly scent of Camellia sinensis and Bergamot filling the room.

Oh, my.

Oh, my!

It was good. It was sensational. It was the culinary equivalent of being wrapped in a warm blanket and being put to bed with a story. It was a Dr. Seuss moment:

Say!
I like your Earl Grey tea!
I do! I like it, can’t you see!
And I would drink it in a boat.
And I would drink it with a goat…

I now heartily agree with C.S. Lewis’ belief that “you can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me,” and Arthur Pinero’s firm belief that “where there’s tea there’s hope.” And I concur with Arthur Gray’s assessment that “the spirit of the tea beverage is one of peace, comfort and refinement.”

So patriot though I am, Samuel Adams and his other cohorts were a bunch of retards. The Great Tea Massacre of 1773 is a dark day in our history. I understand protesting the government sucking you dry with taxes. (Oh, do I.) But what a waste!

Here, in its entirety, is the text of the article that forever changed my life and spawned an obsession that shall continue unabated unto my dying day:

*******

Tea

One or two Americans have asked me why the English like tea so much, which never seems to them to be a very good drink. To understand, you have to make it properly.

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea, and it’s this—to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boilING (not boilED) when it hits the tea leaves. If it’s merely hot, then the tea will be insipid. That’s why we English have these odd rituals, such as warming the teapot first (so as not to cause the boiling water to cool down too fast as it hits the pot). And that’s why the American habit of bringing a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water to the table is merely the perfect way of making a thin, pale, water cup of tea that nobody in their right mind would want to drink. The Americans are all mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most Americans HAVE NEVER HAD A GOOD CUP OF TEA. That’s why they don’t understand. In fact, the truth of the matter is that most English people don’t know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants.

So the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this: Go to Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you’re staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the sealed packet and sniff. Careful—you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal. When the kettle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot, swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the size of the pot) of tea bags into the pot. (If I was really trying to lead you into the paths of righteousness, I would tell you to use free leaves rather than bags, but let’s just take this in easy stages.) Bring the kettle back up to the boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly as you can into the pot. Let it stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup. Some people will tell you that you shouldn’t have milk with Earl Grey, just a slice of lemon. Screw them. I like it with milk. If you think you will like it with milk, then it’s probably best to put some milk into the bottom of the cup before you pour in the tea.* If your pour milk into a cup of hot tea, you will scald the milk. If you think you will prefer it with a slice of lemon, then, well, add a slice of lemon.

Drink it. After a few moments you will begin to think that the place you’ve come to isn’t maybe quite so strange and crazy after all.

*This is socially incorrect. The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.

May 12, 1999

Copyright note: This personal, non-commercial reprint is in keeping with H2G2’s copyright rule found at www.bbc.co.uk/terms/ The original article can be found at: www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A61345

The print bibliographic reference for this article is: Adams, Douglas. “Tea.” The Salmon of Doubt. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. p. 67-69.