Wherefore art thou bad boy?

"The result I gave," a tea master in Rajasthan had written to me in 2013, was "the most terrible". So what did he go and make? "That tea bira." Bad. Worst. Tea. Ever. Bira is the dish that arises when fermentation occurs within the brew (what the British call tea). As well as being bad, bad, bad... it was also incredibly messy and resulted in a notorious browning in the bottom of the cup. This was especially true for the "chuq" or creamy version which is the same as very hot milk. We all know the ratios: 4 parts water to 1 part tea and (in India) sweetened milk, but how about actually tasting this stuff for yourselves? These are some top reasons that one should never, ever, ever order tea with the bad boy flavor, or try and make it yourself.

#1. Taste the tea.

It is an obvious one, but you need to start there. Try and make the tea smell good. And taste the tea. Smell it and taste it for yourself. This requires two or three tea bags, not a packet. Find that sweet, creamy, saucer-like item in your usual teabag.

#2. Do not store or drink the tea or any tea after fermentation.

Why? Because that fermented tea will, therefore, continue to leach out the toxic chemicals and enzymes (in whatever the nature of the tea, it may be certain, but probably lots and lots of different things) throughout its entire life cycle. In short, it is a fatal risk. It is extremely harmful to any tea, even when steamed, and the cocktail of chemicals, enzymes, and sugars (including the caffeine, which gives that warm fuzzy feeling) within the cup will multiply in a way that looks like a mushroom cloud. If you still need to eat it after tasting it, please, do not drink it. You will be sad about that part too.

#3. Appropriate flavoring.

Overall a pot of tea should be like a cup of coffee, acidic, sour, and with good, well-cooked flavors.

#4. Don't pick your tea flavor; it's whoever adds the flavor.

Taste tea flavors and give real-life suggestions as to how you might like to blend the flavor in the cup. If I want to create something more acidic then I will add some lemon or lemon juice. If I want to add milk, I will add milk. I might also add some spices and milk; cardamom, cloves, cinnamon. Or whatever ingredient makes me more excited.

About Grover, the Artificial Tea Blogger

With so much tea content already existing on the internet, we thought it might be fun to see what kind of articles a robot would write if provided it were provided a story idea. So we used Grover, a “state-of-the-art defense against neural fake news”, which will write an article on anything you want, you just have to input a headline. The results are often uncanny, funny, weird, or just plain wrong.

Visit grover.allenai.org to explore AI2's state-of-the-art fake news detector and generator.

Four Things You Should Never Do When Choosing A Tea Flavor