Yes - so many coffee houses that we could do with some tea rooms, selling a range of speciality tea and hardly any coffee. The way coffee houses do, in reverse.
The problem with tea in coffee shops is that the coffee machines are regulated to dispense water at 96 degrees. The tea is made with the same water which isn’t hot enough which not only affects the flavour, but also leaves that unpleasant looking scum on the surface.
Yes - so many coffee houses that we could do with some tea rooms, selling a range of speciality tea and hardly any coffee. The way coffee houses do, in reverse.
We have one - the wide range of tea at any rate: Northern Tea Merchants' Cafe down Chatsworth Road, if you're ever in this neck of the woods.
I used to work for the company that supplied one of the ingredients that went into Horlicks.
I was told that South Asia was one of their largest markets, as it was drunk there all through the day, and not seen as just a bedtime drink.
I get your point about coffee - it has to come at the temperature it comes at. I make my own, and it doesn't really have much variety, except if I need to top up the milk with cold.
FFS never work in IT, @Hugal . You'll explode inside a week.
I would concur with this, seeing as it is where I work. "Can you just fix this for us please, urgently" usually means hacking something wrongly. Because doing the correct fix would take several days and they won't wait another hour.
Other wrong things: Something that seems to be occurring more than it should is cakes made of biscuits. You know the sort of thing - a cake covered with cream and with biscuits stuck on it.
The problem with tea in coffee shops is that the coffee machines are regulated to dispense water at 96 degrees. The tea is made with the same water which isn’t hot enough which not only affects the flavour, but also leaves that unpleasant looking scum on the surface.
One would assume that the budget for fitting out the coffee shop would have extended to an electric kettle.
I'm not a tea drinker, though observation of tea drinkers and conversations about tea would suggest that making a "proper cup of tea" is a minefield for cafe staff that makes getting the coffee temperature right seem like a walk in the park.
Other wrong things: Something that seems to be occurring more than it should is cakes made of biscuits. You know the sort of thing - a cake covered with cream and with biscuits stuck on it.
I have had one. It was sweet even for me.
Yes. Also brownies and ice cream, with biscuits/and or chocolate. I don't want a Biscoff, Kinder Bueno, Oreo or Mars Bar brownie or ice cream.
I despair at being served a decent cup of tea any more in a cafe. A little pot of tea used to come with a small jug of milk and hopefully a nice china cup. Yesterday I was served a cup of hot water with a tea bag perched on the saucer. Horrors! It appears that so many people now drink coffee and the art of tea making has just about disappeared.
Not where I work. Tea in pot, a cup and a little jug of milk
Satan's bladder is far too busy supplying American breweries.
Fuck you.
I should have been more specific. Supplying whichever organisation is responsible for Coors and Budweiser.
Still...fuck you.
Let me tell my Shiner Blonde story. My late father was a master brewmaster for AB. Upon retirement he helped out his buddies at the Spoetzle Brewery in Shiner, Texas on an expansion of facilities and lines. They wanted a "lighter" beer to add to their line. He provided the recipe and they created Shiner Blonde. Oh, man, did the beer snobs love it! Won awards, kudos in the beer snob press, etc... It was fucking Michelob. Beer snobs can bite me.
It's a mass-produced American beer (owned by the same company that produces Bud), though IMO it's quite a bit better than other mass-produced American beers I've had - which is, of course, a statement of personal taste more than anything else, and based on being the beer I drank when I spent a couple of months in the US in the 1990s on the recommendation of the students I was working with.
As a person who rarely drinks anything but porters and stouts? So, some people liked a shitty lager? Still a shitty American lager. And yes American, because the number of Americans who drink lagers mean it's hard to get anything else.
I've got anger about a lot of things and this argument is deliciously petty. Thanks @Gwai, dear, for bringing it to my attention.
I remember being invited to someone's house, being offered Miller Lite and thinking "Heh, not bad. Doesn't taste like much but...sure."
I also remember helping someone move, someone who was a teetotaler who understood that "pizza and beer" is what you give people when they help you move. So I was served Bud Lite. And I am not a picky person, and a very light drinker, but I struggled to drink a can of that. Its taste was not merely bland, it was also disgusting. She'd bought a case. I felt embarrassed for her.
I also observed a local microbrew that specialized in producing lagers (I think they're called Metropolitan) and found them surprisingly appealing. Even @Gwai agreed, though I do not think they found the experience memorable. And wouldn't likely go out of their way to drink it.
Now, if I am buying beer, I have somehow absorbed the hipster tendency toward IPA's. And I am that rare sort who can drink a medicinally bitter IPA cheerfully and laugh while my friend mocks hipsters for paying good money for beer that tastes objectively bad. I think I have some inner feeling dating back to my first beer (Burning River by Great Lakes) that beer is supposed to taste bitter and that's just what it is.
Anti-elitist elitism is a very interesting look. Drink what you like.
Horlicks is indeed produced by Beelzebub, and hot chocolate's fine if you want to go to sleep, but imho it would be completely useless in the morning.
My wife is a fan of ....
....
.... Ovaltine!
There was an earlier time when malted drinks in general were thought to confer health benefits, I'm guessing Ovaltine dates back to those times. I'll occasionally drink cocoa (as it's hard to get hot chocolate without added sugar).
As a person who rarely drinks anything but porters and stouts? So, some people liked a shitty lager? Still a shitty American lager. And yes American, because the number of Americans who drink lagers mean it's hard to get anything else.
Seems like you live in a big enough city to get plenty of stuff other than lagers. Don't you have BevMo? Or craft breweries?
Why are people often so disparaging about lager? It seems all right to me.
(IANALorBD)
I think there's a preponderance of cheap lagers (at least in the US) that don't have much flavor, and that gives the style a bad name. I think it is similar to the situation with American country music. Also, Budweiser.
I'll admit I have been someone who had an attitude about lagers until I tried a few that I liked.
@Ruth I do get other things besides lagers. But I have to commute to do it. Last time I was out, I walked by liquor store and stopped in. I looked at the cooler and saw nothing I liked. Before I could leave an employee came blocking the way out. "Are you looking for something?" I said I was looking for a porter, particularly the Great Lakes porter. (It's a very well known brewery around here.) He looked at me like I was speaking Pennsylvania Dutch.* I darted around him and left. And I meant to get to the store today, but my kid needed help and now I have to make dinner. And the store near me doesn't carry anything besides the classic big brand lagers. So yes it's inconvenient for me.
*I was going to say Swahili, but quite a few people around here speak Swahili, it would probably get less confusion.
Speaking as someone who shares a household with @Gwai and does a fair bit of the shopping:
Even in big grocers of vast selection, it's interesting. If you're into IPA's, there are far more than any reasonable person could try, even a reasonable person who enjoys IPA's. And there's large volume of the usual big brand American lagers, of course. And there are a few big name imports like Guinness.
But if you are looking for non-IPA beers, they're often hard to find or more limited in selection. And I feel like that has gotten worse over the past five or ten years.
And @Ruth, since you mention, I remember reading once that the American beer called "Budweiser" was originally a Czech beer, and the Czech company has been in an apparently 100 year trademark dispute with Budweiser for taking their name. The same beer in the US is branded Czechvar. I think I tried it once and found it pleasant.
I'm a dark beer person - porters, stouts, dark milds - it's not the best of times this side of the Pond either. Lots of very pale stuff that unfortunately tastes like grapefruit pith steeped in battery acid to me.
Just had two pints of homebrew Woodforde's Norfolk Nog which is the sort of thing I wish I saw more of in the pubs.
And @Ruth, since you mention, I remember reading once that the American beer called "Budweiser" was originally a Czech beer, and the Czech company has been in an apparently 100 year trademark dispute with Budweiser for taking their name. The same beer in the US is branded Czechvar. I think I tried it once and found it pleasant.
Budvar! Anheiser Busch copied Czech-style beer, and it was probably good or at least decent when they started out. And then they gradually changed it, using less and less ingredients, which made it increasingly both cheaper and more bland. The Czech Budweiser people are still big mad about it, and I don't blame them - they make good beer.
One of my favourite beers is a Czech product - Staropramen - and a Czech chap who happened to see me buying a bottle in our local Co-Op duly complimented me on my good taste...
The baseball game starts at 5 PM here, and I had no beer on hand, so inspired by this thread I walked down a block to the nearest liquor store (where I have previously only bought ice cream and cat food). There was a cooler full of White Claw (hard seltzer, which I totally don't see the point of buying -- I can put spirits into seltzer on my own), a bunch of different IPAs, a few six- and 12-packs of Coors and Bud, one each of everything Modelo makes (including Modelo Negra, but that's dark lager) and a few other random things.* I settled for Blue Moon Belgian White, a Coors product, but drinkable, if you like wheat beers.
*And kombucha. Which I didn't know came in hard versions. I've only had the non-alcoholic versions, and my God, I know know how people drink that stuff.
*And kombucha. Which I didn't know came in hard versions. I've only had the non-alcoholic versions, and my God, I know know how people drink that stuff.
Nor do I—but then, I don’t know how or why people drink black coffee or gin or most of the craft beers I’ve ever tasted. Meanwhile, my wife loves kombucha and makes her own.
One would assume that the budget for fitting out the coffee shop would have extended to an electric kettle.
The problem is that that would take time to boil, and you'd have to have a freshly boiled pot of water for many of your customers (you'd have to be pretty lucky to be able to make 3 or 4 cups for each boiling).
One would assume that the budget for fitting out the coffee shop would have extended to an electric kettle.
The problem is that that would take time to boil, and you'd have to have a freshly boiled pot of water for many of your customers (you'd have to be pretty lucky to be able to make 3 or 4 cups for each boiling).
There are also on-demand boilers that produce a cup at a time, or ones (like my last staffroom had) which keep water "on the boil" for making hot drinks.
I am intrigued, though: is it the temperature of the water that makes good tea or the fact that it is at boiling point? Put another way: is it possible to make a good cup of tea at the top of Ben Nevis (boiling point of water ~95°C)? Conversely, if it is temperature, would you get better tea if it were made in a deep mine shaft or a pressure vessel? It is famously possible to superheat water using a microwave. Could this phenomenon, suitably controlled, be deployed to make better tea?
One would assume that the budget for fitting out the coffee shop would have extended to an electric kettle.
The problem is that that would take time to boil, and you'd have to have a freshly boiled pot of water for many of your customers (you'd have to be pretty lucky to be able to make 3 or 4 cups for each boiling).
There was a time when going into a coffee shop and ordering a coffee, the staff would take a jug of coffee from under a filter and fill your cup instantly. Now, there's a whole process of emptying a little container of coffee, filling it again, putting it in a machine for water to filter through etc ... is that really quicker than boiling a kettle and filling a tea pot that has an appropriate number of tea bags in it? Of course, there's the time for it to brew, but that can be left to the customer to choose how strong they want their tea.
One would assume that the budget for fitting out the coffee shop would have extended to an electric kettle.
The problem is that that would take time to boil, and you'd have to have a freshly boiled pot of water for many of your customers (you'd have to be pretty lucky to be able to make 3 or 4 cups for each boiling).
There are also on-demand boilers that produce a cup at a time, or ones (like my last staffroom had) which keep water "on the boil" for making hot drinks.
I am intrigued, though: is it the temperature of the water that makes good tea or the fact that it is at boiling point? Put another way: is it possible to make a good cup of tea at the top of Ben Nevis (boiling point of water ~95°C)? Conversely, if it is temperature, would you get better tea if it were made in a deep mine shaft or a pressure vessel? It is famously possible to superheat water using a microwave. Could this phenomenon, suitably controlled, be deployed to make better tea?
The answer is both. The heat helps to bring out the flavour but you can get flavour from cold water. It is improved with hot water. Serving it at a rapid boil means the leaves whirl around the pot/bag. That gives more flavour. That is why you would traditionally get a pot and a strainer. You need some kind of chamber for the tea to whirl round in. You can achieve a kind of whirl with hot not boiling water by having the water source a bit higher than normal, but you need to get the right height and flow not to get scolded.
Proper continental lagers, especially Belgian, German and Eastern European can be wonderful stuff as opposed to the stuff that’s brewed here in the UK under licence. The proper name for his type beer though is pilsner. Lager is a British term to describe that type of beer which is rarely, if ever seen outside the UK or Ireland. The word lager is actually a brewing term referring to the maturing process of the beer which is ironic because the piss served as lager in this country is pasteurised before it has a chance to mature, which probably explains why it tastes so disgusting.
Proper continental lagers, especially Belgian, German and Eastern European can be wonderful stuff as opposed to the stuff that’s brewed here in the UK under licence. The proper name for his type beer though is pilsner. Lager is a British term to describe that type of beer which is rarely, if ever seen outside the UK or Ireland. The word lager is actually a brewing term referring to the maturing process of the beer which is ironic because the piss served as lager in this country is pasteurised before it has a chance to mature, which probably explains why it tastes so disgusting.
Point of order - Pilsner is a subset of Lager - Lagers can be a range of colours because as you say the name harks back to the brewing process - low temperature usually using bottom-fermenting yeast and then matured in the cold.
Proper continental lagers, especially Belgian, German and Eastern European can be wonderful stuff as opposed to the stuff that’s brewed here in the UK under licence. The proper name for his type beer though is pilsner. Lager is a British term to describe that type of beer which is rarely, if ever seen outside the UK or Ireland. The word lager is actually a brewing term referring to the maturing process of the beer which is ironic because the piss served as lager in this country is pasteurised before it has a chance to mature, which probably explains why it tastes so disgusting.
Point of order - Pilsner is a subset of Lager - Lagers can be a range of colours because as you say the name harks back to the brewing process - low temperature usually using bottom-fermenting yeast and then matured in the cold.
Fair point. Even so, I’ve never seen it described as lager anywhere else in the world.
There was a time when going into a coffee shop and ordering a coffee, the staff would take a jug of coffee from under a filter and fill your cup instantly. Now, there's a whole process of emptying a little container of coffee, filling it again, putting it in a machine for water to filter through etc ... is that really quicker than boiling a kettle and filling a tea pot that has an appropriate number of tea bags in it? Of course, there's the time for it to brew, but that can be left to the customer to choose how strong they want their tea.
[/quote]
I can't remember when we last went into a coffee shop and were served coffee from a jug. Nowadays, coffee here means espresso, and most commonly (at least 80% of the time) cappucino. (BTW, your second sentence seems to start by talking about making coffee and then switches halfway through to making tea.)
There was a time when going into a coffee shop and ordering a coffee, the staff would take a jug of coffee from under a filter and fill your cup instantly. Now, there's a whole process of emptying a little container of coffee, filling it again, putting it in a machine for water to filter through etc ... is that really quicker than boiling a kettle and filling a tea pot that has an appropriate number of tea bags in it? Of course, there's the time for it to brew, but that can be left to the customer to choose how strong they want their tea.
I can't remember when we last went into a coffee shop and were served coffee from a jug. Nowadays, coffee here means espresso, and most commonly (at least 80% of the time) cappucino. (BTW, your second sentence seems to start by talking about making coffee and then switches halfway through to making tea.)
Alan was comparing the time involved in preparing coffee with boiling a kettle for tea in response to claims that boiling a kettle would take too long in comparison.
My personal hypothesis is that the big coffee brands are secretly anarchists. We all know their views on proper tea.
Alan was comparing the time involved in preparing coffee with boiling a kettle for tea in response to claims that boiling a kettle would take too long in comparison.
I think that was what he intended to say, but it's not how it came across to me.
Proper continental lagers, especially Belgian, German and Eastern European can be wonderful stuff as opposed to the stuff that’s brewed here in the UK under licence. The proper name for his type beer though is pilsner. Lager is a British term to describe that type of beer which is rarely, if ever seen outside the UK or Ireland. The word lager is actually a brewing term referring to the maturing process of the beer which is ironic because the piss served as lager in this country is pasteurised before it has a chance to mature, which probably explains why it tastes so disgusting.
Point of order - Pilsner is a subset of Lager - Lagers can be a range of colours because as you say the name harks back to the brewing process - low temperature usually using bottom-fermenting yeast and then matured in the cold.
Fair point. Even so, I’ve never seen it described as lager anywhere else in the world.
No, it tends to be described according to its sub-group.
Ah, yes. General terms. Like an event I went to many years ago where I went up to the bar and asked what beer they had, to be told that they had something Australian (Fosters or similar) or bottles of something very similar. So I asked if they had whisky and got told they had Southern Comfort. That hit a few "other wrong things" categories. Though they did go to the effort of redeeming themselves, as I left the bar empty handed muttering something about "real ale, single malt whisky" someone slipped out from behind the bar and returned 10 minutes later with a bottle of Glenfiddich.
I have quite a sweet taste bud so prefer lager to bitter. In fact I cannot drink or eat anything bitter. Grapefruit is horrible for me. Budweiser? If I want water I will get it from the tap. I like wheat beers and Belgian style fruit beers. I tried Sam Adams Winter Lager in the US and enjoyed that.
Cheap patisserie like the eclairs and tarts you buy in a supermarket are not right. Edible but still wrong. The Choux paste is awful.
I seem to recall many years ago a consumer programme doing blind taste tests of beers. The response to (what turned out to be Budweiser) was "if you were given that in a hospital you'd ask what it was".
Comments
My wife is a fan of ....
....
.... Ovaltine!
(Mind you, she also likes coffee: we drink loads of the stuff, and never instant).
We have one - the wide range of tea at any rate: Northern Tea Merchants' Cafe down Chatsworth Road, if you're ever in this neck of the woods.
I used to work for the company that supplied one of the ingredients that went into Horlicks.
I was told that South Asia was one of their largest markets, as it was drunk there all through the day, and not seen as just a bedtime drink.
I would concur with this, seeing as it is where I work. "Can you just fix this for us please, urgently" usually means hacking something wrongly. Because doing the correct fix would take several days and they won't wait another hour.
Other wrong things: Something that seems to be occurring more than it should is cakes made of biscuits. You know the sort of thing - a cake covered with cream and with biscuits stuck on it.
I have had one. It was sweet even for me.
I'm not a tea drinker, though observation of tea drinkers and conversations about tea would suggest that making a "proper cup of tea" is a minefield for cafe staff that makes getting the coffee temperature right seem like a walk in the park.
Yes. Also brownies and ice cream, with biscuits/and or chocolate. I don't want a Biscoff, Kinder Bueno, Oreo or Mars Bar brownie or ice cream.
Not where I work. Tea in pot, a cup and a little jug of milk
Still...fuck you.
Let me tell my Shiner Blonde story. My late father was a master brewmaster for AB. Upon retirement he helped out his buddies at the Spoetzle Brewery in Shiner, Texas on an expansion of facilities and lines. They wanted a "lighter" beer to add to their line. He provided the recipe and they created Shiner Blonde. Oh, man, did the beer snobs love it! Won awards, kudos in the beer snob press, etc... It was fucking Michelob. Beer snobs can bite me.
While I understand the sentiment, I’m generally continent just to roll my eyes and let the beer snobs display their snobbery like peacock feathers.
I remember being invited to someone's house, being offered Miller Lite and thinking "Heh, not bad. Doesn't taste like much but...sure."
I also remember helping someone move, someone who was a teetotaler who understood that "pizza and beer" is what you give people when they help you move. So I was served Bud Lite. And I am not a picky person, and a very light drinker, but I struggled to drink a can of that. Its taste was not merely bland, it was also disgusting. She'd bought a case. I felt embarrassed for her.
I also observed a local microbrew that specialized in producing lagers (I think they're called Metropolitan) and found them surprisingly appealing. Even @Gwai agreed, though I do not think they found the experience memorable. And wouldn't likely go out of their way to drink it.
Now, if I am buying beer, I have somehow absorbed the hipster tendency toward IPA's. And I am that rare sort who can drink a medicinally bitter IPA cheerfully and laugh while my friend mocks hipsters for paying good money for beer that tastes objectively bad. I think I have some inner feeling dating back to my first beer (Burning River by Great Lakes) that beer is supposed to taste bitter and that's just what it is.
Anti-elitist elitism is a very interesting look. Drink what you like.
I'd stick my tongue out and try to drag you into my mouth, given my handle, but I'm not sure you'd fit.
(IANALorBD)
There was an earlier time when malted drinks in general were thought to confer health benefits, I'm guessing Ovaltine dates back to those times. I'll occasionally drink cocoa (as it's hard to get hot chocolate without added sugar).
The vast majority - all the commonly found ones in pubs in the UK - are very poor exemplars of the style - Lagers can be very good but most aren't.
Seems like you live in a big enough city to get plenty of stuff other than lagers. Don't you have BevMo? Or craft breweries?
I think there's a preponderance of cheap lagers (at least in the US) that don't have much flavor, and that gives the style a bad name. I think it is similar to the situation with American country music. Also, Budweiser.
I'll admit I have been someone who had an attitude about lagers until I tried a few that I liked.
*I was going to say Swahili, but quite a few people around here speak Swahili, it would probably get less confusion.
Even in big grocers of vast selection, it's interesting. If you're into IPA's, there are far more than any reasonable person could try, even a reasonable person who enjoys IPA's. And there's large volume of the usual big brand American lagers, of course. And there are a few big name imports like Guinness.
But if you are looking for non-IPA beers, they're often hard to find or more limited in selection. And I feel like that has gotten worse over the past five or ten years.
And @Ruth, since you mention, I remember reading once that the American beer called "Budweiser" was originally a Czech beer, and the Czech company has been in an apparently 100 year trademark dispute with Budweiser for taking their name. The same beer in the US is branded Czechvar. I think I tried it once and found it pleasant.
Just had two pints of homebrew Woodforde's Norfolk Nog which is the sort of thing I wish I saw more of in the pubs.
Budvar! Anheiser Busch copied Czech-style beer, and it was probably good or at least decent when they started out. And then they gradually changed it, using less and less ingredients, which made it increasingly both cheaper and more bland. The Czech Budweiser people are still big mad about it, and I don't blame them - they make good beer.
*And kombucha. Which I didn't know came in hard versions. I've only had the non-alcoholic versions, and my God, I know know how people drink that stuff.
To each their own.
The problem is that that would take time to boil, and you'd have to have a freshly boiled pot of water for many of your customers (you'd have to be pretty lucky to be able to make 3 or 4 cups for each boiling).
There are also on-demand boilers that produce a cup at a time, or ones (like my last staffroom had) which keep water "on the boil" for making hot drinks.
I am intrigued, though: is it the temperature of the water that makes good tea or the fact that it is at boiling point? Put another way: is it possible to make a good cup of tea at the top of Ben Nevis (boiling point of water ~95°C)? Conversely, if it is temperature, would you get better tea if it were made in a deep mine shaft or a pressure vessel? It is famously possible to superheat water using a microwave. Could this phenomenon, suitably controlled, be deployed to make better tea?
The answer is both. The heat helps to bring out the flavour but you can get flavour from cold water. It is improved with hot water. Serving it at a rapid boil means the leaves whirl around the pot/bag. That gives more flavour. That is why you would traditionally get a pot and a strainer. You need some kind of chamber for the tea to whirl round in. You can achieve a kind of whirl with hot not boiling water by having the water source a bit higher than normal, but you need to get the right height and flow not to get scolded.
Point of order - Pilsner is a subset of Lager - Lagers can be a range of colours because as you say the name harks back to the brewing process - low temperature usually using bottom-fermenting yeast and then matured in the cold.
Fair point. Even so, I’ve never seen it described as lager anywhere else in the world.
Yes, there aren't many power sockets and the kettle tends to slide down the mountain.
[/quote]
I can't remember when we last went into a coffee shop and were served coffee from a jug. Nowadays, coffee here means espresso, and most commonly (at least 80% of the time) cappucino. (BTW, your second sentence seems to start by talking about making coffee and then switches halfway through to making tea.)
Alan was comparing the time involved in preparing coffee with boiling a kettle for tea in response to claims that boiling a kettle would take too long in comparison.
My personal hypothesis is that the big coffee brands are secretly anarchists. We all know their views on proper tea.
I think that was what he intended to say, but it's not how it came across to me.
I suspect I can say with reasonable certainty that you will not get up Everest without one.
No, it tends to be described according to its sub-group.
Cheap patisserie like the eclairs and tarts you buy in a supermarket are not right. Edible but still wrong. The Choux paste is awful.