A Standard for tea!? - Surely this is Madness

An ISO standard for making Tea? Surely the world has just gone mad, bureaucracy is taking over, and it's just getting a little silly now, who needs a standard for making tea? Anyone can make tea; you bang on the kettle stick a tea bag in a cup and then pour in the hot water and then the milk… Well, hold on a minute, my gran would be incredulous with the very thought of not putting the milk in first, my dad just would have milk at all, and who makes tea in a cup? Isn't there a teapot involved?? So, maybe there is more to this than there appears.  

Let's set a standard!

Surely, just the fact there is so much variation means that we need a standard. Well, it turns out there is an ISO standard for this, ISO3103 and its title is "Tea — Preparation of liquor for use in sensory tests", which may give you a hint of its purpose. The idea of the standard, or any standard, is to create consistency. When there is a consistent standard, everything can be repeated and, importantly, compared.

It tells you, for example, the apparatus you need to run the testing:

1. Pot of white porcelain or glazed earthenware, with its edge partly serrated and provided with a lid, the skirt of which fits loosely inside the pot. (There is even a drawing with dimensions – turns out you can use 2 sizes)
2. Bowl, of white porcelain or glazed earthenware (again there is a drawing & sizes)

There is a table about how much tea (with a % tolerance by weight), the temperature of the water and of course the brew time to ensure consistency.

Of course, since we have carefully defined the pot & the bowl, we know a large pot has 285ml (or 9.64 fluid ounces) of water and a small has 140ml (or 4.74 fluid ounces) of water.

There are very clear instructions about making tea with milk, turns out that the default process is actually pouring the brewed tea into the bowl after the milk, in order to avoid scalding the milk, although it does say you can add the milk after, but, it stresses, "the best results are obtained when the temperature of the liquor is in the range 65 °C to 80 °C when the milk is added." So there you go, now you know, never let it be said our blog posts are not educational!

Why the fuss?

Why is this standard being so precise about making a cup of tea? Well, if it hasn't dawned on you by now, this is the standard for carrying out testing of tea blends by tea manufacturers. It allows them to have repeatable test conditions so that they can compare one blend of tea with another knowing the only variable is the tea itself. The pot is the same, the bowl is the same, the temperature, how much water, how they add the milk, it's all the same. So when something isn't right they know that it's the tea, not the tools being used, not the process being used but the raw ingredient.  

The benefits of standard work

Can you imagine if there was no standard way of doing tea testing, or any testing, say seatbelt testing? What if there were no standard way to put your cell phone together or your brake system in your car, or that chocolate cake that only your mum and your wife can make the same since your mum passed the recipe onto your wife (because it's a family secret).

Standards are there to set up a single 'best way' of doing things which keep getting used, until a new best way is discovered, and then you switch to that. In lean, we call is standard work, it's what the ISO standards are after as well. You're one best way that means you have consistency on how you do key things in your business.

What having a consistent process doesn't do is remove the ability to change, to innovate and develop new ways of doing things or new processes or new products, (did you ever see the triangular tea bag?)

Having a documented process is going to give you a starting point for the inspiration and allows you to understand what things have changed to give you that improvement.

How you manage those standards is up to you, in both an ISO and a lean world these things are documented and revision controlled so that we know we are using the latest version. You can choose to do that any way you like, but using a system like Mango allows you to make use of the inbuilt document management module and control all of your revisions and even tell people when you have a new version (including recoding it on their training records).

Having a standard and having it readily available or even better right in front of those who need them makes everything nice and simple, leaving you lots of extra time to relax, have that freshly brewed cup of tea and a bit of the family secret recipe chocolate cake safe in the knowledge that your tea and cake will be exactly the same as it was last time because you have a standard.