What are the safety considerations in making pine needle tea

I've never known the science behind it, but water heated in a microwave oven makes horrible tea and coffee. You need a kettle.

The standard British teabag-and-mug technique (as opposed to the loose-tea-and-teapot technique) is:

• put cold tap water in kettle
• turn kettle on
• put teabag in mug
• allow kettle to come to full boil
• fill mug with freshly boiled water
• leave for 30 seconds or so
• remove teabag with a teaspoon; give it a little squeeze for extra flavour
• stir in sugar (optional)
• add milk (optional)

Scientific rationale:

• The water needs to be as hot as possible to extract all the flavour: boiling water can't get any hotter
• Remove the teabag before adding milk or sugar because otherwise some of the milk/sugar will be removed along with the teabag
• Stir in sugar before milk because it will dissolve more efficiently in hotter liquid
• Milk last because you can judge the colour more easily

However

I've seen people claim that the water should be cooler than boiling, because the boiling water destroys subtle flavours in the tea. That may be true, but I suspect that teabag-grade tea just isn't that fine; in any case the conventional wisdom is boiling water for tea, below-boiling water for coffee.

A note on strength and timing

The longer you leave the teabag in, obviously, the stronger the resulting tea. Experiment and find your preference. 30 seconds seems to be about right for a typical British tea drinker, and a typical British teabag.

However, it should be noted that a typical British teabag isn't really intended for the one-mug method -- it's a size originally sized for teapots, and you're likely to get at least two mugfuls from one teabag, if you make tea in a pot and top up with boiling water after pouring.

You could, in theory, re-use a teabag to make a second mug of tea, but teabags are so cheap that hardly anyone bothers.

The teabags found in some cafes, smaller and with a string for pulling them out of cups, need a longer steep, since they contain less tea.

I had the chance to ask a tea scientist this very question about 25 years ago, and he said:

• if you put the tea in first, over decades your cups will be more stained than if you put the milk in first
• if you put the milk in first, you cannot add less milk on discovering that the tea is weak or there is less of it than you thought

He further reported that the Royal Family always put the tea in first. So, despite being raised milk-first, I am a tea-first person (the milkiness of my tea being more important than possible stains to my cups) and my mother tolerates this when she visits.

Killing bacteria in the milk is really not an issue now and probably never was; even if it were the temperature difference is not important between the two approaches. A little cold milk in a room temperature cup probably won't prevent thermal shock either: many people claim leaving the spoon in serves this purpose, but I think it's just to avoid putting the spoon down on the counter and leaving a dribble.