Mistakes you've made related to tea...
my worst was probably putting on a kettle to boil then wandering off and forgetting it. I came back to the kitchen about 20 minutes later and it was totally dry. I’m lucky I didn’t burn the house down.
I had that happen once when I didn’t have a kettle that whistled. The bottom of the kettle adhesed itself to the burner. No good!
This! Except I use a shallow pot, and I’ve done it multiple times ._.
EmilyM, that’s incredible/terrible! Was it difficult prying the kettle off?
KiwiDelight – We had to buy a new burner. While the kettle did come off with a little work, there was residue on the burner that would not. Now a whistling kettle is a must for me. I’m just too scatter-brained for anything else!
Oh my gosh! The worst I’ve done was creating evaporation stains. I should probably set an obnoxious timer to remind myself to avoid worse things. I suppose, being absent-minded, we’re our own hazards.
I am seriously hazardous to my own health. Too much going on + easily distracted = disaster! haha
Timers are good, too. You don’t want to burn the house down!
Luckily I have a kettle that turns itself off so I don’t have that worry. And I’ve fixed my everyday occurence of oversteeped tea by always setting the oven timer. xD; It’s so irritating that I HAVE to get up to turn it off or else I’ll be driven up a wall. And then I get tasty tea as a reward. :D
I have an electric kettle that has an automatic shut off too. One day I left it plugged in, but there was no water in it and it was for sure turned off. Something tripped in the electrical wiring of the kettle and it turned on and burned itself out. I didn’t know until I smelled the smoke from the melted plastic of the base of the kettle. So now I make sure to unplug my new one all the time!
Yeah, that starts happening especially if they’re starting to get older. The one before this one (same model since it’s amazing, but newer) would constantly turn itself on whether there was water or not and would just burn into oblivion until someone noticed and yanked the plug. Is yours Breville? (not that one touch one, but just the regular kettle with different heat options) maybe that one specifically tends to do that with a bit of age.
Chizakura – Yeah, I use the oven timer as well sometimes, as I have a tendency to forget about tea. Nothing gets me up faster than an annoying buzzing sound!
Lala – Oh no! That’s awful. I’ve been over at my neighbors a lot watching their dogs while they’re away and they have an electric kettle I’ve been using. I’ve been leaving water in it just in case, but now I think I’ll be unplugging it despite the automatic shut off! Yikes!
Mine was a hamilton beach. So not super high quality, but I sure didn’t expect that to happen.
Chizakura: Thanks for the tip. I’m going to get into the habit of turning on the oven timer every time I heat water. We have one of those bulbous tea kettles with a whistle stopper but the whistle doesn’t work.
To be really honest Jim it happened to me twice during my college years and I was living in a dorm, so I would have burned the entire place down.
I know and that is the funny part. I could have burned the whole place down and no one would have noticed until maybe the smoke and all…
I have burned a couple of saucepans this way also… one of which had come in the brand new set of pots and pans my husband and I had received as a wedding present… was not happy with myself.
When I got my Timolino at DT, I sprang for an oolong as my free tea without considering that gee, they’re going to leave the leaves in there. It was sooo bitter, and I had no way of dumping out the leaves since I was commuting.
A blasphemous mistake that I frequently make is I end up steeping teas only once (well, minus oolongs. I make sure I am around to steep them around three times). Like flavoured blacks and greens usually get one for me. Between wanting to drink five different kinds of tea in one day and/or being on the go and not wanting to fuss with storing them for later, I just dump them. Sigh. Think of the money I could save.
I used to buy tea bags from the grocery store and think to myself “what a nice, healthy lifestyle you’ve developed for yourself and so easy…”. That wasn’t all! I used to prepare the tea bags in my own fashion meaning that I put the tea bag in a big cup, filled it with tap water and microwaving it all! Three times wrong and silly!
This happened until a friend of mine came over and I asked her if she wanted some tea or coffee. She was a big tea fan so she immediately said that she would love a nice cup of Darjeeling if I had any or any type of green. I looked curiously at her and pulled out the tea bags doing like I always did. She started to laugh, recommended me some sites and books about tea explaining that what I was drinking until then was whatever you want to call it, but not at all tea. That was the moment when the tea spark hit me and made me change completely my tea ways.
Well, this isn’t strictly MY mistake, but it’s pretty hilarious, and my father isn’t on Steepster anyway.
My father had a pretty snazzy bright red whistling tea kettle, and he would use it to make himself Irish Breakfast pretty religiously every morning. My husband and I were visiting one evening about two to three weeks after he got this snazzy kettle, and we used it to brew ourselves some tea. After I had taken the leaves out of mine, I noticed some flaky fragments floating at the top of my cup that didn’t really look like the tea I’d selected… and my husband noticed the same thing in his cup, even though he’d brewed a different tea.
We opened up the kettle and found several more of these flakes floating around in the kettle, in various shapes and sizes… and some of the flakes were large enough for us to see printed words on them. The flakes were paper, and had once been the user instructions for the kettle. My father, bless him, had taken the kettle out of its box, filled it with water (it was one of those where you could fill it from the top under the handle or directly through the spout, and he typically chose the latter option), and set it on the stove, never realizing the instructions were inside. He probably did this every day until my husband and I realized what had happened and cleaned it out. X-D
Oh my! That IS funny. xD At first I was worrying about the poor shiny red kettle expecting something terrible to happen to it, and I could definitely say I wasn’t expecting that. xD
Did you ever tell him, or just have a giggle as you cleaned it? :)
Forcing myself to drink a tea I don’t like, just because I spent money on it or it was a gift. Then you end up hating that tea and not enjoying the experience, and also wasting time. I finally learned that if I don’t like it, I just toss it, or pass it on.
I have also learned to be more specific about my tea preferences to my family and friends. That way when I receive tea from them, it is something that I told them I liked, and not something I feel I have to choke down just because it was a gift.
Thats what I usually do, but I have some friends that don’t believe in gift cards because they think it is “impersonal”.
I’ve gifted samples sizes of tea. Picked something from a new company that I though people would enjoy. Sometimes one of those sample boxes from a favourite company.
Dropped my favorite mug.
Bought way too much tea (50-100g) that I’d never tried before.
Forcing myself to drink tea I don’t like so as not to waste it.
Putting coffee in my timolino. /0\
Various steeping mistakes – not enough leaf, water is too hot, etc.
Not drinking enough water to balance out the caffeine.
The upside? I have learned a lot since the summer! :)
:| Whenever I drink out of it, it tastes sorta tinny and ‘off’ to me, so now I don’t know what to do. Is it because I just don’t like tea in travel mugs, or did I destroy this one? Is it worth $30 for another one to find out? I wish I’d known better when I bought it! I was so new at tea then!
Questions… :P
have you tried soaking in baking soda w vinegar? (no guarantees it wont start smelling like vinegar tho…maybe just baking soda then?)
Baking soda + vinegar = volcano. Only want to pick one or the other.
I’d go with baking soda myself. Whenever it’s clean something I drink out of, I go with the baking soda. I’m always worried the vinegar would be the next problem since it’s so strong.
Yeah I’ll have to give that a shot!
Hmmm.. but if I made a volcano, that would be enough pressure that it MIGHT clean it for me? :P (I’ll try the baking soda).
Today I made another mistake. Went to a specialty coffee location with the intent of trying their high end cup o joe. Why, o why. It’s not that it was bad, it’s just NOT the same as drinking a nice strong cuppa tea.
Coffee store: +$4.00
Me: -$4.00 + Sad
putting teas with different scents together ^^’
I still do that. A lot of teas are in plastic bags sorted in cardboard boxes.
Not preheating the teapot and cups before brewing.
Being lazy about cleaning the teapot leading to foul odors.
Buying teas, especially flavored ones, after smelling them at Teavana which tasted horrible after brewing them at home
Adding milk and/or sugar to green tea (with a few exceptions like matcha and chai)
Buying mugs with ceramic infusers. The tea would fall right through the holes
Following the manufacturer’s brewing instructions. They are almost never correct.
Guesstimating water temperature instead of using a thermometer
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