If you ask for "tea" at a restaurant, what happens and where do you live?
In the South East, they bring you sweetened (usually far too sweetened for my tastes) iced tea. This is amazingly universal. I live in NC and have been probing the border for years. For “nicer” restaurants, the universal sweet tea boundary seems to be precisely at the NC/VA border.
India, You'll get properly boiled tea with milk (chai) unless you specifically ask for black/ red tea which you'll only get in Kerala (called black/kattan ) & in our NorthEastern states (called red tea/lal cha).
The 2nd best way to piss off an Indian is to serve tea brewed with teabags, the best to upset us is to serve tea brewed using teabags and using powdered milk.
We like our tea to be boiled with milk, water, spices, and sugar/jaggery. If you want to make our day, boil the tea with condensed milk, water, and spices and watch us beam. The spices will always be fresh and any combo of sweet cardamom, ginger, cloves, star anise, pinch of cinnamon, lemongrass,
Tea is very serious with us. A compliment on tea (chai achchi bani - the tea is made well) is huge and will make you a favouite guest.
Try to get your hands on loose Assam CTC black tea or (even better) loose Nilgiris CTC black tea. and go to town experimenting with spices and sweeteners (karupatti/palm jaggery adds a new dimension of flavour). Nilgiris tea is forgiving and doesn't get astringent if you overboil it, while Assam will teach you a lesson in bitterness. Darjeeling is all flavour but lacks oomph (or as Indians say 'not strong enough' ).
The spices should be lightly crushed and added to the water right in the beginning.
You should try more loose leaf teas.
The bag itself will limit the leaf length, and both bagging, transport and storage in the bag degrades teas at a very accelerated rate.
See if you can find a tea with at least 4 cm (half a finger length, or about 1.5") leaf length and compare, preferably with an enthusiast brewing it to get the most flavor out of it. A popular variant is Silver needles.
That’s where you’ll start getting complex and changing flavor profiles from the tea itself, it’s not for everyone, but well worth a try.
It isn't just the quality of the tea leaf/ powder in the teabag that is being called out, The method of brewing tea ruins it all. Proper tea (is theft, we know. we all laughed, including the toaster) is made by boiling tea leaves/ CTC tea/ dust tea in water or water + milk not by dunking a teabag or 2 in a cup of tepid water for a few seconds, and then topping it with an even more tepid milk.
The Chinese/ Cantonese brew lovely tea using loose tea leaves because the water they use is boiling hot and in a teapot, which lets the tea steep and release its flavours, and of course they don't add milk.
You can try out all methods and compare the results.
An advantage of loose tea is you can customize your tea blend. Eg, blend Assam and Darjeeling in 1:1 ratio for a balanced tea of strength and flavour, 1:2 for a more flavourful tea with a decent body, 2:1 for an aromatic tea that can kick like a mule. A Ceylon tea blend of nuwara Eliya tea & Kandy tea is a balm for a tired heart.
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