Irish Tea Culture
The Irish tea culture is an important Irish custom. In fact, drinking tea is as important here if not more important than the Irish drinking culture. Tea is enjoyed in even greater volume than alcohol between family and friends- at all hours.In fact, the Irish are the heaviest tea drinkers per capita in the world, averaging four to six cups per day with many people drinking even more. Should you be invited into an Irish household, you can be sure that as soon as you cross the threshold you’ll be offered tea as an icebreaker. And once you’ve finished that cup, you will be offered more tea, and so on.
Not surprisingly, there is a definite etiquette surrounding tea-drinking in Ireland. Ideally the tea is brewed in a teapot, which must be scalded beforehand by swirling hot water around in it and emptied, though making tea in separate mugs is more common.
You must seep the teabags—typically one per cup of tea—in water that has only just been brought to the boil. Of course the very thought of drinking tea black is heresy. A large drop of fresh and good quality milk is essential in producing the typical Irish cup of tea. Sometimes as much as a third of the cup is filled with milk, depending on the tea drinkers’ colour preference.
While tea has been enjoyed for hundreds of years, the humble tea bag was only invented just over a century ago. Around 1908, a New York tea merchant called Thomas Sullivan accidently came up with the tea bag when he began to send samples of tea to his customers in tiny silk bags.Some people thought that the bags were to be used in the same way as traditional metal infusers so they put the bags straight into their teapots instead of emptying out the contents.Sullivan later swapped the silk for gauze after his customers remarked that the fabric wasn’t ideal, and so the tea bag was born.