How to Make a Perfect Cup of Tea

Anthony Burgess on a British obsession.

May 23, 2025

One of Anthony Burgess’s tea mugs. Picture: Graham Foster.

If you want to start a fight among British people, the quickest way is to ask them how to make a cup of tea. Should it be made with tea leaves in a pot, or with a tea bag in a mug? How long do you brew it before you drink it? Do you take it black, or with milk or a slice of lemon? Is it better with sugar or without? Should the milk go into the cup before or after the tea? Is it wrong to slurp it out of a saucer? There seems to be no agreement on these questions, and practices vary considerably, often depending on social class and the region where the tea-drinker grew up.

George Orwell entered the debate in 1946 with an article for the Evening Standard. Setting out his eleven golden rules of tea-making (see the link below), Orwell lays down the law on questions such as the shape of the cup and the importance of taking the pot to the kettle to ensure that the water is boiling hot when it hits the leaves. He also offers a strong opinion on when to add the milk:

One should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. […] I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

Anthony Burgess often wrote about tea-drinking, for example in an essay about Lancashire food and drink, commissioned by the New York Times in 1973. After listing various edible horrors to be found in the county of his birth — raw tripe served with pepper and vinegar, steak and cowheel pie, saveloys, black puddings — he declared that fish and chips was the best Lancashire dish, but it had to be accompanied by a pot of tea.

You drink it hot and strong, with no nonsense about tea-bags and lemon-slices. Into the warmed taypot you put two spoonfuls of tea (always Ceylon, not Chinese) for each person, and another two for the pot. You use boiling water, and you let the tea stand for five minutes. You drink it with milk and sugar.

A cup of hot, strong Lancashire tea, Burgess tells us, can also be enjoyed with an Eccles cake, ‘flat, round, crisp, fat, golden, stuffed with currants, raisins, candied peel and other odd spices.’

Of course, Burgess was not the only English eccentric to be obsessed with tea. In his later years, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson gave up drinking wine and instead became, as he put it, ‘a hardened and shameless tea-drinker’. According to his biographer James Boswell, Johnson would sink at least fourteen mugs of tea per day, always drinking it without milk. The Labour politician Anthony Wedgwood Benn, known as Viscount Stansgate until he renounced his peerage in 1963, boasted that he had drunk enough tea in his 88 years (one pint every hour, on the hour, throughout the working day) to float the Queen Elizabeth II ocean liner. This was an unlikely claim, and Benn was rather vague about his calculations.

In Burgess’s novel The Clockwork Testament, the third volume of the Enderby quartet, the poet F.X. Enderby, employed as a temporary professor of creative writing in New York, enjoys a good strong brew at breakfast time: ‘And he would make tea, though not altogether in the America manner – five bags in a pint mug with ALABAMA gilded on it, boiling water, a long stewing, very sweet condensed milk added.’ For his lunch Enderby eats a wind-inducing meal of ‘canned corn beef hash with a couple of fried eggs, say, and a pint of tea. A slice of banana cake. And then, this being America, a cup of coffee.’ The consequences of his gluttony are notated on the page as a series of phonetic burps.

In 1992, Burgess contributed an introduction to The Book of Tea (also known as Le Livre du Thé and Das Buch vom Tee), a large-format illustrated history of the tea industry, published by Flammarion in Paris. Other contributors to the book included the food historians Alain Stella, Nadine Beauthéac, Gilles Brochard and Catherine Donzel.

Burgess warns his readers against tea bags, which, he insists, impair the flavour of the tea, and whose outer casing is rumoured to be full of hazardous chemicals. He also deplores the practice of flushing tea leaves down the toilet, for reasons which are purely aesthetic. This practice ‘lends an excremental flavour to what has been a civilised potation.’ The best method of disposal is to feed the used leaves to hens, who like them mixed with stale bread.

He reserves particular scorn for Ian Fleming, primarily known as a drinker of gin and martinis, whose James Bond novels claimed that tea was a drink suitable only for women. ‘The working class,’ Burgess says, ‘begs to differ.’

Among other free-wheeling reflections, he provides detailed instructions on how to prepare the perfect cup of tea:

First, you must have a capacious teapot. Then you must have a kettle. Boil your water and at the same time heat your teapot. It must be perfectly dry. Place the teapot in an inch or so of very hot water; when its external bottom is hot enough to make the hand uncomfortable, its internal bottom is hot enough for the tea. Place into the warmed pot, according to the tradition, one teaspoonful for each drinker and an extra teaspoonful as a gift for the pot. You may, of course, increase these doses according to taste. I substitute a dessert spoon for a teaspoon. Pour on boiling water from the kettle. Stir the infusion gently. Place the lid on the pot and leave it for five minutes. Then pour into cup or mug.

Playing the diplomat, Burgess refuses to take sides on the question of adding milk to the cup either before or after the tea. ‘I do not think it greatly matters,’ he says. The important thing is that there should only be a very small amount of milk, ‘to soften the impact of the tannin content.’

Burgess takes care to point out that the consumption and enjoyment of tea is by no means limited to British people. He notes that Maurice Ravel, one of his favourite French composers, included a jazzy tea dance titled ‘Le Five O’Clock’ in his fantastical opera, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.

Burgess drank tea in Gibraltar, America, Italy, Russia and Malta — but, in French supermarkets, it was difficult to find anything except the teabags that he deplored.

He ends his essay with an upbeat and resonant sentiment: ‘Tea is a fact of British life, like breathing.’ Along with tobacco and alcohol, it was one of the stimulants that fuelled the production of Burgess’s thirty-three novels and twenty-five non-fiction books. Sitting down at the typewriter without it would have been unthinkable.