TeaChat

Just a few questions about milk in tea:

How much milk do you put in tea?

Do you add warm or cold milk?

Do you add the tea to the milk? Or add the milk to the tea?

I've only tried it once, and wasn't quite sure what I was doing, or if I was doing it right. I don't think I'd typically add milk to tea (say, like when I'm at work), but would like to try it with Irish Breakfast tea. I just want to do it the right way.

There's no wrong way. Add milk as you please. Cold milk is great for cooling down a scalding cup of tea. If you're feeling decadent, cream is downright fantastic with Irish Breakfast (or any other Assam-heavy blend).

I avoid drinking teas where adding milk seems like a good idea.

No need to dilute or mask bitterness with well-brewed green teas, oolongs, white teas, or puerhs, or with user-friendly yunnan gold & black ruby from Taiwan.

Debunix makes a good point. If you like milk in your tea, that's one thing. If you're adding milk to tame the bitterness however, then either the tea has steeped too long or the tea itself is poor quality. If you like Irish Breakfast, then you'll probably love a high-quality Assam.

I like my tea without milk. I just add the milk on weekends for something different, more as a treat.

I use teabags and pour boiling water over it in my cup. I warm the milk for about 20 seconds in the microwave and add it to my cup of tea. If I'm using a 16 oz cup, I brew 2 teabags. Then add a shot (yes, as in a shotglass) of milk. If I'm using a standard size coffee cup, then I use one tea bag, and add a hal a shot of milk.

So far it seems to work.

When I make masala chai, I do it the proper Indian way by boiling the milk with the tea. That results in a creamy, well mixed brew.

It tastes very different from when you add milk to it later, whether that be cold or warm milk.

I add milk to the tea so that I could adjust how much more milk to add. I add cold milk to the tea, so that the mixture wouldn't be too hot to drink immediately. And I sometimes boil puerh or hei cha in milk (but that's a lot more cleaning work than mixing milk and tea).
I have barely found any Chinese black tea compatible to milk (a common problem is milk shadows tea flavors), but think Indian, Ceylon and Kenya black teas go pretty well with milk (they seem to have some flavors that can escape from being shadowed by the milk).

I like my tea without milk. In the past I have experimented with adding milk to blacks, but I prefer my tea with no milk nor sugar. I haven't try masala tea, though some sample from our tea shop must be on my way to test it.