Which comes first, milk or hot water? It’s a debate that tears families apart and fractures friendships. However, the one person you can't argue with is the Queen. Now HRH's official tea supplier, Twinings, has actually stepped up and established the proper way to make tea.
Drum roll please. Twinings says that to make the perfect cup of coffee, you should add the milk first and then the hot water.
For hot water first truthers, this may well come as a shock. But, as brand director Stephen Twinings explains, "This allows the milk to cool the tea, rather than the tea heating the milk."
Twinings have the science to back them up. According to Loughborough University's Dr Stapley, adding milk first prevents the milk from heating unevenly and stops "the proteins in it from denaturing, meaning they lose structure and 'clump', which affects taste and helps to form the skin on top,” reports The Guardian . As Twinings sums it up, it simply "allows the milk to cool the tea, rather than letting the tea heat the milk."
The brand was founded by Thomas Twining in 1706 and first received royal recognition from Queen Victoria in 1837. She granted the company its first Royal Warrant for Tea, which is "a mark of recognition given to a person who supplies goods or services to the British Crown" with the Queen, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh or HRH the Prince of Wales for a minimum of five years and with an ongoing arrangement. "
Victoria subsequently appointed Twinings as tea supplier to the royal family, and the company continued to supply tea to "every British monarch to this day."
"As a company, from that day until today, we have been honored to supply products to every King and Queen of the United Kingdom," Stephen Twining, the brand's director of corporate relations, told Town & Country . He is the tenth generation of his family to run the business.
If you want to know what the Queen likes, you won't learn the secret from Stephen. "The first rule of doing business with the royal family is of course confidentiality," he said. But as Town & Country writes, Her Majesty likes her Twinings Earl Grey, with a little milk and no sugar, according to a former royal chef.
