The general advice is that you should brew your tea for a minimum of two minutes, but what if you don’t have two minutes?
Let’s say you’re late for work, but because you’re so cripplingly British, you can’t even muster the strength to leave the house without a cuppa. Or let’s say you’re having a night in watching Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch and the next episode is just about to start.
Or let’s say you’re in a hostage situation – a bank robbery gone bad, perhaps – with a gun against your head and a man in a balaclava screaming: “If you don’t make me a cup of fucking tea in the next 30 seconds, I will blow your brains out through your balls.”
Assuming you don’t want your brains and balls to meet in a pile of mush, what are you going to do?
Introducing: No More Tea Bags – instant tea in a can!
This is “Liquid Instant Tea”, according to the No More Tea Bags website. The concept is simple: squirt a small amount into the bottom of your mug, top it up with hot water and milk, and pow – you’ve got yourself a cup of the good stuff.
Now before you whip out your quills and start writing to the Queen on your best Union Jack writing paper, yes, this does feel like a bit of a cultural assault.
Being perhaps the most historically oppressive culture in human history, it’s not often this happens to us Brits, but when it does, we jolly well load up our muskets, climb the barricades and sing Rule Britannia until we shit out our lungs.
However, not wanting to get all Brexit about the situation, I thought it best to give No More Tea Bags a fair crack of the whip. After all, how bad could instant tea from a can really be?
Here’s what it looks like in the mug
Mmm, brown.
It doesn’t really smell like tea, but then what does tea really smell like? It just kind of smells of hot. This, being cold, doesn’t smell of hot.
I can also confirm that in its undiluted form, No More Tea Bags tastes like the bubonic plague, but since you’re not actually supposed to squirt it directly into your mouth as I did, that’s not a terribly fair critique. Gordon Ramsay doesn’t suck on raw meat then complain that the chicken en croûte gave him salmonella, and so neither shall I.
Here’s what it looks like when you add water
Mmm, pond scum.
Aside from the fact that you’re squirting brown sludge out of a can into your favourite mug, this is the first real sign that something is amiss. Even in the most bearded of hipster cafes, tea doesn’t come with a froth on top. Even the hipsters know better than that.
I was already a little uneasy about No More Tea Bags, and these ghostly suds did nothing to ease my worries. And I’m sorry, as bleeding-heartedly liberal as I am (owns Guardian tote bag, enjoys spiralized vegetables) bubbles have no place in an English cup of tea. They might do that on the continent, but Not. In. My. England.
Here’s what it looks like when you add milk
Mmm, farmyard puddles.
To be fair, it does settle down after a few stirs and starts to look like a normal cup of tea.
Looking at the finished product, you would not be able to tell it apart from a normal cuppa. It looks as warm and inviting as a freshly microwaved duvet or the blissful embrace of death. But it’s not about looks and it’s certainly not about smell.
The only thing that really matters is taste.
Here’s what I looked like before taking the first sip
Fresh-faced, full of life, only the slightest of bags under his eyes and a hairline that says “it’s been lovely, but I really must dash”, this is a portrait of an average man in his late 20s whose only goal is to have a nice cup of tea.
See his thumb, raised aloft, signifying a-okayness. See the mug in his hand, primed and ready to sup. See the smile on his face, semi-oblivious to what’s coming next.
Here’s what I looked like after taking the first sip
A picture paints a thousand words. This picture paints two words 500 times over: “the fuck?”
Immediately it’s clear that this is not tea.
It definitely tastes a bit like tea, as though someone distilled the essence of tea into a cologne, then created a £10-a-bottle bootleg of that cologne and sprayed it into a hot cup of milk and water. There’s a metallic tang to it, as though the water had leaked through a rusty radiator in an abandoned hospital and into the mug.
The other downside of instant tea is that it lacks body. Normal tea, even that piss-weak shit that your nan forces you to drink as punishment for never calling her, has a bit of something about it, a kind of thickness. Instant tea is – and this is a stupid thing to say about a water-based drink – watery as fuck.
I cannot, as a proud Briton of sound mind and sore knees, say that it was a good cup of tea. It was like a photocopy of a good cup of tea, through which another cup of tea was strained and then served.
The No More Tea Bags website makes a number of promises: “Properly brewed better tasting tea; No more used tea bags to dispose of; Easily control the strength of your tea; Hotter, tastier tea in an instant.”
True, there certainly are no tea bags to dispose of. Of the many great weights upon the shoulder of man, throwing tea bags away is not really one of them, but less waste is a good thing, I suppose.
If you like a stronger cup of not-quite-tea, you can just squirt more in, and while it’s not quite instantaneous, it takes significantly less time than making tea the usual way, and if there’s one thing we all need more of in this life, it’s perspective.
But properly brewed, better tasting tea? That is just a stretch too far.
In no known universe would this be considered better tasting than tea from a tea bag, and if you’re so impatient that you can’t wait a few minutes for your tea to brew, there is zero chance that you appreciate nice things anyway. To paraphrase Sweet Brown, ain’t nobody not got time for that.
So until the machines take over and all of our sustenance is distributed to us in 3-hour rotations by robots with aerosol teats, stick with the tea bags. They’re cheaper, tastier and considerably less depressing.
Don’t believe us? Try No More Tea Bags for yourself, starting at £3.99 a bottle, plus shipping.
