No, of course we don’t microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.
Ok, but, why is microwaved water any different the water warmed in a kettle?
This seems like a pointless thing to get worked up over.
Water warmed in a kettle has much more even temperature in all points, which affects the brewing process. Generally, the more even the temperature is, the more consistent and rich is your brew.
I would consider microwave boiling as a makeshift method to produce a mediocre result when you need it anyway, not as a daily driver.
How does a kettle warm the water more evenly but a microwave doesn’t? When a kettle has it’s heating element only at the bottom but a microwave blasts the entire mass of water with energy because it sits on a rotating plate.
Cold water falls to the bottom of a kettle and boils on the bottom. Microwaves can miss the bottom, possibly?
I’m asking this from a place of genuine ignorance: how does the evenness of the heat distribution matter when microwaving a pure liquid? I’m familiar with the microwave’s uneven heating qualities. I’m sure we’ve all bit into food that is scalding hot on the surface and still lukewarm at best in its interior. However, I’ve always presumed that is a product of microwaving a heterogenous, predominantly solid substance.
So, sure, the microwave applies heat unevenly to the water. But wouldn’t the tiny little bits of water which get “over” heated simply diffuse their excess thermal energy into the rest of the homogenous volume in very short order? Furthermore,wouldn’t an uneven heat distribution in a mug of water simply lead to convection currents flowing from hot to cold, therefore promoting a relatively even distribution?
The overheated particles will rapidly move upwards, which will lead to relatively even distribution in a layer, but uneven between heights.
In fact, in a large microwaved mug the difference between top and bottom can be as much as 6°C/11°F.
Using a kettle mitigates it for the most part, as it is the bottom that gets continuously heated, and the top is then naturally heated by the vertical currents of hot water, leading to a more even distribution.
In my experience you won’t actually boil water in the microwave because it takes an eternity so you end up with tea in “warm” water instead. Or apparently some people also put the tea bag in the microwave ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Brother it takes 3 minutes to boil water in the microwave. I have done this without fail.
It cools down much faster though. Not sure how that works.
Could be a problem if you microwave it together with the tea bag.
Also I find microwaves to not heat up the water properly, leaving some cold spots.
The microwaves will heat your water more evenly than a kettle.
Liquids have this amazing property, that if you heat them , they auto-stir just by themselves.
(But personally, I’m uneasy about microwaving a tea bag with paper on one end, or worse, a staple. There’s probably no problem at all, but it doesn’t feel that way.)
Hard to believe that cold spots could stay for more than a moment with the Brownian motion.
:(
My husband is Northern German, close enough to England that he was horrified at the thought of making tea in the microwave. And he doesn’t even really drink tea when he’s not sick.
Ha, my sister lives in Germany and the weirdest thing she finds about German tea habits is that they only drink tea in winter, which I guess is kind of on a par with being sick. In the UK tea is a constant but in Germany it seems to be more of a special circumstances thing (illness, cold weather…). Even the person my sister buys her tea from shuts up shop in the summer because there’s no market for it.
Tea is an inefficient delivery system for caffeine. If there’s no caffeine in it, it’s a warm beverage that relaxes you. So why would the industrious German worker bee want to bother with tea bags when coffee is right there? Unless of course the bee is sick and needs to relax, doctor’s orders, to get back to work as soon as possible. ;)
The patriot in me smiles every time I microwave the water. Yankee Doodle, motherfuckers.
Yeah the kettle is just for boiling the water, nobody makes tea in it, that would wreck it. Yes, I’m English.