I'm not usually one to pander to clichés, but as a Yorkshireman and Briton I do like a good cup of tea.

Unfortunately, my ideas of what constitutes a good cup of tea are really quite particular, to the point where I would rather drink coffee than risk an unpalatable cuppa.

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At the risk of offending those friends and relatives who have made tea for me in the past, these are my steps to make a sound cup of tea, that being a mug of a brew strong enough to stand a teaspoon up in.

1. set the water to boil.

2. place a teabag in your chosen mug.

   Whilst good tea can come out of teapots, my preference for individual tea supply is a bag in a mug (primarily because it produces strong tea quickly).

3. add boiling water, or water which has only just come off the boil, to the mug. Ensure the bag has opened out or the tea won't brew properly.

4. leave the mug alone. Three or four minutes is usually sufficient, but a couple more minutes does no harm. Leaving the water to go cold is definitely too long.

   A technique which is useful to shorten the brewing time is to broddle the tea bag with a teaspoon, but an initial minute or so of unassisted brewing will always produce better tea.

5. remove the tea bag. Squeezing the teabag is optional, but doing so leaves less liquid to drip on the kitchen floor and to foul the bin.

6. add milk, but very little.

   I find this is the most troublesome aspect to get right, but my own preference is for the tea to to still be translucent which requires less than a teaspoonful. It is difficult to be precise, since the exact amount of milk depends on the strength of the brew and the size of the container.

   Frankly though, drinking tea with too much milk in makes me feel sick and is the motivation behind this very page.

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For best results, use good tea bags. This may seem like an obvious point, but it really is almost impossible to get a decent cup out of the cheapest teabags.

My favourites in Britain include Twinings Classic and English Breakfast, Yorkshire Tea, and Whittard's Good Strong Tea. Tetley Tea and PG Tips are also OK if left for long enough, but anything with a fair representation of Assam is always a good option.

The tea bags which I have been using thus far in the States are Tetley's British Blend, a bag which is both sufficiently powerful and mercifully free of Tea Folk. I was sad when my last Yorkshire Tea teabag was used, though.

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There are some things which, if done in the making of a cup of tea, can render the result utterly undrinkable: what you end up with is dishwater rather than a pungent and reviving infusion.

1. water that isn't hot enough. This expecially happens if you use a coffee machine to make tea. Coffee machines are designed to make coffee, only heating the water sufficiently for that drink which is scalded by boiling water. However, water just the right temperature for coffee is just not hot enough to make tea.

   Please, use a kettle or a pan to ensure the water is actually close to boiling.

2. adding milk before the water. This has a similar effect to not using hot enough water in that the tea never really gets a chance to brew, but magnified to the point where the product is something so slimily unpleasant as to be unrecognisable as tea.

   Note that adding milk to the mug after brewing but prior to bag removal is merely odd rather than disastrous. Further, adding milk to a cup when pouring tea from a pot is a practice with a long history which I only avoid because the result is usually too milky for my taste.

Hell may be other people, but there is a nasty area of purgatory where bad tea is served to the British.

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