How To Get The Most Caffeine Out Of A Cup Of Tea
There are two major kinds of people: Those who can't go a day without the caffeine-powered get-up found in copious amounts of coffee, and those who swear by tea and only tea.
It's easy to see why coffee and tea would be such widely acceptable beverages. According to Your Best Digs, 159 million Americans drink tea every single day, while 150 million people are said to drink coffee, per Deals On Health. Not only do they have distinct individual tastes and flavors, but the methods of preparing them are also quite similar (via Diffen). They help people get through the day, they serve as drinks at social gatherings, sometimes serve as conversation starters, and have clearly become huge parts of our everyday culture.
Perhaps one similarity between these two beverages which doesn't get spoken about enough is that many types of both contain caffeine, an organic chemical which serves as a stimulant to the human central nervous system (via Better Health).
Typically, tea packs a lesser caffeine punch than coffee. You will find anything from 95 to 200 milligrams of caffeine in a cup of coffee, whereas tea has only about 6-75 milligrams of caffeine, depending on the type of tea you prefer. But there are ways to extract more caffeine from your teabags.
You don't need to squeeze a teabag to get more caffeine from it
The caffeine content in tea is not as much as what you would find in coffee, so it is important to make the most of the limited amount of caffeine present in each teabag (if caffeine is what you're after). The simple secret to achieving this is to steep the tea bag into your cup for longer than just a moment. The more time you have the teabag steeped in your cup of hot water, the more tea flavor will seep out into your cup, per Zest Tea. To get just the right amount of caffeine out of each teabag, you should steep it for around three to five minutes, per Mental Floss.
Some people make the mistake of using their spoon to try to squeeze out more essence from the teabag, but that's not actually helpful. Instead of more caffeine, you'll get a cup of bitter-tasting tea, per Boston Tea Campaign. To be on the safe side, stay within the recommended time frame for steeping, and then reuse the teabag for another tea serving (via Apartment Therapy), instead of trying to squeeze out every last tea essence at once.