Beverage Mixing Coffee and Tea Together

Every time I order tea in a hotel or at Starbucks I get this.

--scott

At Starbucks you get a previously unused cup of hot water and a Tazo teabag. I'm curious, how do you manage to mess that up and get coffee in it? :-P~

Carmen

I seem to always get water with coffee contamination. The problem is that coffee oils get onto anything that is used to store coffee, and once it has been used for coffee you shouldn't ever use it for hot water.

--scott

Never had this problem with either local restaurants or coffee houses, including Starbucks. The roadside diner that uses the Farmer Brothers Coffee maker for a pot of hot water will probably introduce new flavors to that cup of Farmer Brothers tea.

That's odd. The source of the hot water at the *$ here is the dedicated hot water spigot on the plumbed-in commercial Bunn. It's separate from sources of coffee contamination. That's pretty standard.

Next time ask the barista to draw your water from the tap and heat it with the steam wand. Explain about the coffee contamination if they ask.

Carmen

Seems to me that back in grad school when I had to finish a paper I would brew a mug of tea using 2 or 3 teabags and then add a couple of spoonfuls of instant coffee.

No-Doz would have made more sense.

Will

Carmen wrote:

That sounds...unpleasant. Very.

I'm thinking so. Heck, you could have dropped them in hot water with some lemon juice and honey and it probably would have tasted better.

Carmen

I've heard this same rumor but I've never seen it served. I don't know if it is an urban legend or not.

Interesting theory ... I like it. I was desperate or groggy, and stupid, when I mixed the two (more than once), and the result was incredibly bad. Never again!

Felix

I don't know if it's that popular in Asian countries, or different country has its own beverage like that, but then this is often served in Hong Kong style cafes.

Some of you might have heard about the Hong Kong style milk tea -- a very traditional and popular drink in HK culture -- strong over-steeped black tea with condensed milk.

Now, if you take only half the cup of HK style milk tea and add coffee... that's the drink in question. It's called Yun Yeung (of course, the name is slightly related to the famous Ying Yang in the sense that the drink is a mix of two seperate beverages.

I've tried it several times, but I still prefer highly the HK style milk tea.

Preperation wise... the coffee part should be easy, cuz HK people usually just use instant coffee. The milk tea part is a bit impossible to imitate. The milk tea has been a HK staple drink for so many decades, each cafe has their own receipes... sometimes a cafe can get so famous with its milk tea that people visit the cafe just to have a cup. Even those HK style cafes in Toronto fail to bring justice to this beverage.

And then, what's tasty to HK people can be totally different from people from other parts of the world, or even, from tea drinkers who are not used to add milk to their teas.

Katie

actually, a couple of cats turds would make it more pleasant than 3 tea bags and 2 scoops of instant coffee.....

I thought of adding cat turds, actually, but they didn't allow pets in the gulag...er...grad student housing.

It isn't an urban legend; we actually used to drink the stuff.

Dan wrote:

Starbucks would come up for a name for "previously unused cup of hot water" implying it's a variety of coffee. The "Transparento," perhaps.

And Tazo sure ain't tea... what do boiled coffee leaves taste like?

--Blair

"A venti transparento? Coming right up, sir. That'll be $3.52 with tax. Have a nice day."

Blair P. Hought> > At Starbucks you get a previously unused cup of hot water and a Tazo

I have had that in Nepal once. I was on a nightbus from Kathmandu to the Indian border. At some nameless place were we had a brief stop this "Coffee-Tea" concotion was the fad of the town. Several guys were pushing it to bus passangers.

I had a cup. It was heavy on milk and dark brown. Then I don't remember any more. ;-)

Lars Stockholm

Let me guess, you're replying from the tea group? I enjoy tea, but what sort varies widely with my mood, the weather, my hairstyle (just kidding about the last one). On a cold brisk windy day I might well go for an ill-mannered but brawny cup of good old Lipton tea. On a cold winter's evening I might opt for a Celestial Seasonings herbal tea and on cool morning in early spring go for some Wedgwood Darjeeling. My true love (see also: obsession) is coffee, but teas definitely have their place.

Carmen

Pretty damned popular in the Chinese restaurant dives of Brooklyn, where you'll have no trouble at all finding it. Comes with lots of half and half, to add insult to injury. Michael

And when you woke up all your money was gone?

--scott