No, of course we don’t microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.
:(
Where’s throwing it into the harbor fall on this chart?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hard to believe that cold spots could stay for more than a moment with the Brownian motion.
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.)
How about someone who leaves the tea bag in the mug, sometimes for multiple days? Sips the tea with multiple bags still in it? It creeps me out and I am not even a big tea drinker.
I once had a colleague who would get hysteric when someone would clean the coffee machine. People are weird. Not cleaning tea potts and even mugs is also quite common among elder germans. They argue it tastes better that way. (They drink the tea without sugar or milk, so it probably isn’t thaaat bad.)
I’ve done that a few times. Mostly when the previous bag was used the night before, and I was super sleepy in the morning, so didn’t even bother ditching it, saving 1.3 seconds and thinking it would make my new tea stronger.
…yeah, I don’t do that anymore. But this is why I used to.
UPDATE: I just made my tea just the regular way this morning. While stirring, I realised I had left the previous night’s red berry tea bag in it. I didn’t want to waste an otherwise perfectly fine bag of Earl Grey, so I did it again. Not intentionally, though. Also, note to self: red berry Earl Grey is not great.
I’m an American who drinks tea. I’d love to hear from our distant countrymen on how accurate this is.
100% spot on. Microwaved tea is comparable I would say to microwaving a steak
… wait, there are some americans who put the tea BAG in the microwave with the water?!?
I’ve MADE tea using a microwave before and it was ALWAYS “heating the water in the microwave, then adding the teabag to the hot water”, it never even crossed my MIND to have the tea bag inside the microwave, and frankly that sounds AWFUL.
For a start, you don’t make tea in a kettle, you boil the water in that, then either pour into a mug or a teapot
Not British, but in my experience… accurate.
I mean, I’m also not British and am roughly aligned with this spectrum myself.
Look, if you can tolerate the absolute nonsense you hear from Americans about how to make coffee you can deal with me having a spice rack specifically to make tea.
What nonsense do you hear about making coffee?
Everyone has their own way, but there’s no wrong way.
I make coffee by drinking hot water, then chewing whole coffee beans and swallowing them. I then wash it down with milk.