Ben Lowry: A good cuppa tea is so easy to make, yet is so rarely made

(Click here for Ben Lowry’s main column about the NI’s inability to control welfare)

​I read it all with pleasure, ahead of National Tea Day tomorrow.

I am a tea junkie. Not infrequently my entire fluid intake in a day is tea: one large mug of it after another.

I tend in the evenings to switch to coffee, which many people say keeps them awake but which I refuse to allow to have that impact – after all, when I took caffeine with exactly that purpose, to keep my eyelids open, as a student cramming for exams, it invariably failed, so I am not going to let it stop me from sleeping now!

We tea lovers suffer the most grievous discrimination: it is cool to be fussy about your coffee, to demand this Nicaraguan blend or that Colombian one.

But if, like me, you are particular about your tea you are a freakshow.

I always marvel at how something so simple as making a good cup of tea can be done so rarely. It is wrong to say that the British and Irish are tea drinkers, because it is badly made all over these islands.

Of the many tips that I would say are crucial to a good cup of tea, I would cite – above all – the need for the water to be boiling when it hits the tea bag. It is not good enough to be merely ‘very hot’ or for the water you are using to have been brought to the boil within the last five minutes. It must have just boiled.

Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor