‘Great’ way to brew tea – and it turns out we’ve been doing it wrong

An expert says you could be making your cup of tea wrong, missing out on the perfect brew.

Chemist Dr Michelle Francl believes we should be adding a pinch of salt to scientifically reduce bitterness. She also says tea drinkers should be warming the milk up first to avoid curdling.

The tips are in her book Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, reports The Daily Star. Dr Francl, of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, US, said: “I enjoyed the challenge of explaining it in a way that people who are not chemists can appreciate the beauty of the chemistry happening and can use what they’ve learned to make a great cup of tea.”

She claims to have analysed hundreds of years’ worth of wisdom to scientifically perfect a cup of tea. And she found the pinch of salt to be the optimal addition.

This, she says, is because the “key element” that is sodium ion “interacts with the chemical mechanism that produces the perception of a bitter taste”. Her other top tips include eating up the cup, never using the same bag twice and never putting tea in a microwave.

Figures show approximately 100million cups of tea are gulped down in Britain each day. The brew expert said her research gave her a “chance to combine my love for chemistry and my delight in a really good cup of tea”.

She also found people in the past have tried to decaffeinate tea with vodka. The chemistry professor said: “Even after all these years of drinking tea and doing research in chemistry, I learned new things about what is in my cup and how to make the very best cup of tea.

“I read hundreds of research reports and tried everything from adding a dash of salt to a cup to trying to decaffeinate tea with vodka in my quest to understand how a cup of tea comes together.”