How To Train Your Barista: A Guide on Making Good Tea, For Cafe Workers Who Don't Give A Shit
Content Warning: Mild tea snobbery. For extreme tea snobbery, see the upcoming sequel to this post.
Someone just sent this to you
If someone sent this to you, you probably work in a cafe that makes bad tea, and that’s ok. Someone sent this to you because they care enough that they want the cafe to do better.
It’s not a reflection on you personally, unless you have somehow single-handedly prevented the employees from receiving proper training on tea. Assuming that’s not the case, whoever’s in charge didn’t think it worth teaching employees anything about making tea. I’m here to tell you that it’s worth your time. Most coffee shops make shitty tea that’s not worth drinking, and you can poach all their tea-loving customers just by making passable tea.
Basic Tea Preparation
Use more tea, not more time
If you want more flavor, you use more tea per volume of water, not more time. More time, past 4 minutes, only extracts more bitterness from the tea. For strong tea lattes or tea that will have milk and sugar, the optimal amount is about 1 tablespoon (or 2 teabags) for black tea. If you’re making a green tea latte, the optimal amount is about 3 tablespoons of loose leaf tea, or 3 teabags. (Yes, the math is inconsistent here, mostly because 6 teabags wouldn’t leave you any room for your water.)
Use quality tea
It’s best if you use loose leaf tea, or at the very least quality teabags. There are plenty of decent teabags out there, like Mighty Leaf , Smith, or Yama Moto Yama. Bigelow and Lipton are bottom of the barrel.
Loose leaf tea will be higher quality than all but the most expensive teabags. All else being equal, it costs less1 is better for the environment2, and is more compact to store.
Ingredient order
Order of ingredients when steeping is important. Steep the tea in the hot water first, so that no milk or sugar blocks the extraction of the tea flavors. Sugar next, because otherwise the milk solutes and lower temperature will slow down dissolving the sugar. Milk last, so that it doesn’t affect the other steps of the tea making process.
Avoiding common mistakes
Don’t steep the tea directly in milk
With the sole exception of making chai from scratch, steeping tea directly in milk will make it sad and flavorless. I’m looking at you, every single coffee shop that makes a ”London fog” by dropping a Bigelow earl gray teabag into a cup of steamed milk. The milk has too much dissolved in it already for the nice tea flavors to infuse. Additionally, the ideal milk steaming temperature (55-65C) is much lower than the ideal tea steeping temperature3, so the extraction will be very weak.
Avoid adding too much milk
Tea is not coffee. Tea is more delicate than coffee. Less milk is required to make a balanced drink, tea only needs 10-20% milk.4 If you add too much, you’ll get tinted milk instead of tea. You can even make things easier for yourself by using oat milk instead of dairy for your tea. It’s more delicate, and makes it harder to obliterate the tea with too much milk. With the popularization of non-dairy milk in coffee, you probably have oat milk on hand already. There are few, if any, circumstances under which I could ever recommend adding half and half or heavy cream to your tea. If you work at a cafe that serves tea, but only provide half and half or cream to your customers, your tea drinking customers suffer for it. Please provide them with whole milk, 2% milk, or better yet, various non-dairy milks.
Use the correct water temperature
Green, oolong, yellow, and white teas (anything except black tea or pu’erh) will burn if steeped in freshly boiled (100C/212F) water, which will make them overly bitter.5 Their ideal temperature is about 68C/170F. Since this is the guide for people who don’t give a shit, you don’t have to bother with a thermometer. If your water is fresh off the boil, throw a splash of cold water in there.
Steep tea for the correct amount of time.
With the exception of herbal teas, tea should not be steeped for more than 5 minutes. Literally just do not. Tea (as in tea leaves from the tea plant)6 should be steeped for a maximum of 4 minutes. Oversteeping will make it extremely bitter. No, putting the teabag in the water and then immediately pouring the steamed milk in and serving it does not count. As previously mentioned, the steeping is effectively stopped as soon as you add the milk.
In contrast, herbal teas (infusions not containing tea leaves) should be steeped for a minimum of 5 minutes. They don’t contain the bitter compounds present in tea, so they will not become bitter from longer steep times.
Footnotes
Price comparison made with Twinings earl gray in an approx. 30-bag package vs 100g tin. ↩
Avoiding individually packaged items is always better for the environment. Additionally, teabags are paper, but “sachets” are made of a non-recyclable fine plastic mesh. ↩
87.8C/190F is the ideal steeping temperature for black tea, 76.6C/170F is the ideal temperature for green tea. Bringing milk up to the necessary temperature for tea infusion will cook the milk, changing its taste and texture undesirably. (However, this cooking is what you want for chai.) ↩
This data was acquired via empirical testing by Tucker R. Twomey. ↩
This is readily demonstrated by Starbucks’ green tea. It tastes bitter with no sweetener because they burn it, but if you add one pump of sweetener, it cancels out the bitterness and tastes like unburned green tea. Curiously, this effect makes it taste like it hasn’t been sweetened unless you add more sweetener. ↩
“The tea plant” refers to Camellia sinensis. This primarily covers black, oolong, green, yellow, and white tea. Though other processed varieties of Camellia Sinensis exist, they’re not usually encountered in a cafe environment. Things labeled “herbal infusion” or “tisane”, do not include Camellia sinenis leaves, and are thus exempt from this rule. ↩