h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've heard conflicting stories as to how hot the water should be to make tea/coffee. I have instant coffee and I've found that putting a little cold water (or milk) in first makes it taste much better (not scalded, I guess). For tea I use teabags, but should the water be just boiled or should it be left to cool?
Does anyone have any ideas about the coffee - am I doing the right thing?

For Tea the water needs to be freshly boiled (the hotter the better)
And its best made in a pot
I don't think it matters that much for instant coffee.

I make it in a pot if I'm feeling *very* thirsty...

I'm *always* very thirsty, one mug is never enough

Mmm I think I'll have one now. Goodnight, everybody!

Water must be boiling for tea, whether the tea is made in a pot or not. Water must be hot but not boiling for coffee. Even with instant coffee you will sometimes see this advice on the label. It's certainly there on Maxwell House and also, I think, on Nescafe. I suspect that you could check the temperature of the water from a coffee-maker and find it's just below boiling.

water for tea should be freshly boiled - repeated boiling loses the oxygen content which is crucial for the brewing process.

If you take oxygen out of water you are left with hydrogen, which you can't use to make tea. Besides, how does repeated boiling remove it? The only way we were able to get oxygen out of hydrogen at school was by electrolysis. I'm not sure the element in an electric kettle would do the trick.

Boiling breaks the bond between the oxygen and hydrogen and causes evaporation. The latter is the oxygen and hydrogen escaping seperately... I think I could be wrong but I am sure it should be freshly boiled. A tea merchant told me that.

Abi - I think your tea merchant may not have been 100% accurate - when water boils the stuff that comes off is water vapour, it ain't separate bits of oxygen and hydrogen. But it would be epic if it were!

How have you settled in to H2G2 towers now?

ahhh but boiling is one of the ways of loosening the bonds between the oxygen and hydrogen cos that way it turns from liquid to a gas!

Well thanks - I think. Very happy

It's the oxygen from *dissovled* air that is removed by boiling, though even after bringing to boiling pont once, I suspect much of the dissovled air has been removed. I'm not sure what (if any) the difference between once-boiled and twice-boiled water would be.

If you observe while bringing water to a boil from cold, you'll see some bubbles forming (which manage to reach the water surface, and hear some noise building up and then dying away before the water starts to boil. This is due to dissolved gases being driven out of the water as the temperatue rises, since, unlike solids, gases become less soluble in water as the temperature increases.
If small bubbles make it all the way from the bottom of the pan/kettle to the water surface much before the water is at boiling point, they can't be water vapour, as if they were, they'd simply recondense and not make it all the way.

See :

http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/answers/lwa329house.html

http://www.csg.lcs.mit.edu/Users/earwig/cuppa.html

Tea...hot? Wha...? The natural condition for tea is in a tall glass, with ice and a bit of lemon, right? What are you...English?

--An American, doing his best to incite a riot...or a tea party

Just trying to be amusing folks...I'm not a completely ethnocentric b*****d. The conversation just seemed to die after I posted...Sorry...I think?
Actually, I never knew hot tea was a science until I met some English folks. Amazing...

That explains why Americans can't make tea.
They were trying to use sea water

Ha-ha! That was actually funny! I was actually beginning to despair. I thought the presence of an "ugly American" drove the civilized peoples of the world away from this conversation topic.
We're not all bad, you know. Some of us aren't actually armed to the teeth either (just a concealed weapon or two...for safety's sake, of course.)
Sorry to disturb the thread. Back to tea. I read somewhere that travellers to America are advised to bring their own teabags, because nowhere else do they brew a cup of tea strong enough to suit the English palate.
Is this true?

The only problem I ever had was that in restraunts they never seem to get the water hot enough to properly brew the tea.
Someone once told me that this was due to idiots suing restaurant owners after scalding themselves, I think over here a judge would probably tell them not to be so stupid
So on my few vists to the other side of the pond I now stick to coffee in restaurants.
This also applies in other countries where coffee drinking is the national hobby e.g. France, they can't make a decent cuppa either

IDIOT!!! I meant 'if you take oxygen out of WATER', or 'if you separate oxygen and hydrogen from water'.

Actually I did post this correction earlier, but it seems to have gone missing!

If you're trying to incite a tea party, are you from Boston? (Englishwoman trots out one of the few bits of U.S. history she knows anything about)