Travel & Food

Steeped in Tradition [sidebar]

London's tea and coffee museum fights to keep up standards

  mrd284@nyu.edu

The Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee brags that it's the first museum of its kind. Its credo: that "everything possible should be done to maintain and improve the quality of tea and coffee offered to the public."

Visitors enter through a pink and green tearoom.

"The tea room attracts a good mix of tourists and Japanese who hear about us through the sister museum in Japan," said tea parlor server Johanna Ford. "But also, a good group of regulars come for fresh morning coffee and quick breakfast or lunch."

The museum was founded in 1992 by tea expert Edward Bramah, who for 50 years worked in the tea and coffee trade in Africa, India, China, and Japan. He was a tea planter in Malawi, a tea taster for Lyons, and a tea "speaker" in Japan. Nowadays he wanders around the museum conversing with customers. Don't get him started on teabags.

The Bramah's extensive collection includes over a thousand teapots, some ornately decorated, others with multiple spouts and shapes. Japanese, Chinese, and Dutch teapots and whimsical china glitter on the shelves. There are also coffee makers of every kind: steamers, reverse drips, infusers, those that use hydrostatic power. And there's the unmistakable Bramah teapot, at two feet six inches tall said to be the world's largest: it can hold 800 cups. But Ford insists, "Bramah's goal isn't just to display hot drink gadgets. It's to learn the tea tradition."

Even in Britain, the freshness of traditional tea is fading. To compete with instant coffee, tea companies are carelessly making tea with a faster, more efficient process called cut tear crush (ctc). Over 90 percent of tea is now sold in bags.

A museum pamphlet stubbornly sets forth instructions for brewing tea the real (aka the British) way:

• Put 1 1/2 tablespoons of room-temperature whole milk into a cup. Don't use skimmed.
• To keep leaves out, pour tea through a mesh strainer.
• Then add more hot water to the teapot, to continue drawing further flavor and strength from the leaves.
• Always discard cold tea at the bottom of the cup before refilling.
• Put a tea cosy, an insulated fabric dome, over the pot to keep it warm.