It definitely will. After a couple years of experimentation and testing I've found anything over ~200F is basically undrinkable. It took me so long to figure this out because there were a lot of confounders -- I drank a lot of tea over the holidays back home, and while my parents' town is on the same water source I swear their florination is different, in a way that changes the mouth feel of the tea. I also had a new faucet installed and the galvanization in the new fixture left a strange aftertaste that took some time to track down. It was so bad that I seriously wonder how people can drink things that come out of Kohler faucets. Finally, I had some new mugs that were also causing problems...turns out the were only fired once? I'm not really sure how to describe it but it was kind of like drinking tea out of a soda can. Anyway, I eventually controlled for all this stuff and about 190F is the sweet spot. It's kind of embarrassing how much of an odyssey this all turned out to be, What works for other HNers?
In some places, most of your instruments will likely be in Fahrenheit and Fahrenheit is what you use daily for most tasks. It only makes sense that you use Fahrenheit as your reference point.
A home in other places is more likely to have Celcius, and you'll likely use it.
Do you think folks are doing it by hand? nope, they use the internet, the same thing we are communicating on.
I agree that the US should convert, but that's another discussion. No need to crap on folks for using something familiar when we all know that's why they do it.
I used a generic unit conversion app that has a specific function for F-to-C conversion. That takes a minute or so to start, enter the numbers, etc. I could have read tens of paragraphs of text in that time.
I agree I'm being a bit harsh here, coming out of the blue on a random comment. But in general I'm very irritated that using non-metric units in an international forum is still a thing. The onus should be on the Americans in their communication, not on others.
The UK and Canada have converted, or are in transition. It takes a generation or maybe two, but I'm certain it's worth the trouble.
USian here, two perspectives. I wish we used the SI system, it’s clearly superior and I agree about the communication problems. It’s also really not that hard to convert temperature roughly, just a factor of two and a constant.
The US customary units have a lot advantages. For example:
In Fahrenheit, 0 is really cold while 100 is really hot. In Celsius, 0 is kind of cold while 100 is damaging to life.
With feet and inches, you can easily divide a foot by 2, 3, 4, and 6 with no repeating decimal digits. It's the same reason the ancient sumerians used base 60 for their number system.
With liquid measure, a cup is roughly what would be considered a serving with a meal while a litre is one hundred millionth the distance from the equator to the north pole, cubed
As a non-American I don't understand the Fahrenheit vs Celsius arguments. What's special about 0F being really cold and 100F feeling really hot? I find that -20C being really cold and 30C really hot quite intuitive and easy to understand. Also in terms of weather it is easy to understand that below zero temps snow and ice will form. Add the convenience that Celsius is basically just an offset of Kelvin and I really don't see the appeal of Fahrenheit at all.
It's just American Exceptionalism. Many people in the US categorically refuse to entertain the idea that their system isn't the best, and come up with justifications that sound funny to outsiders.
I've been living here for 15 years and the recurring pattern still hasn't stopped being funny.
In terms of outdoor air temperature in the North East US, 0-100F is basically the temperature range you’ll experience throughout the year. 50 is about average in spring/fall.
12 is a handy number but decimal calculation isn't difficult either, especially when all your units use the same.
What is a cup? How do you do calculations with a third of a cup etc?
I know a cup is roughly 200 mil. From exposure in life I know 200ml is about a cup of tea and 300ml is about a mug of coffee /can of come, 500 is a big can of beer. How many cups are in a can of beer?
The US represents half the readership on this forum. Audience-wise it's a "pick your poison" scenario in avoiding communication problems, so what's wrong with an individual copying their notes into a website not just leaving the units as written?
This sounds messy but works out well for a lot of temperatures we are used to, for example... 0C is 32F ... 100C is 212F ... 20C is 68F ... 30C is 86F ... etc.
Why on earth would anybody willingly do that, unless forced by situation... and that situation should not be happening in 2023, period. Heck, even whole science is on metric system and Celzius/Kelvin scale so there goes usability argument.
I've heard all the excuses in past 4 decades whenever this topic comes up, but they can all be summed up as: butthurt ego, we are better than anybody and we don't care about reasons.
In Europe, during more primitive medieval times, even my tiny little country that wasn't country before had maybe 10 different measure systems mostly based on human body, various weight systems etc. There were always reasons for system XYZ, different conversion tables and so on. They were not worse than what US uses now, and are all part of history for same very good reasons.
Its not even a topic about 2 balanced viewpoints like driving left or right, metrics et al have trivial conversions so even folks struggling to finish primary school are well versed in it. What you describe is impossible to do for even older university-educated folks, unless they have been doing it for their whole lives.
No point in using kph for speed if all of the signs are in mph.
No point in learning C for air temperature if the forecasts are in F.
No point in using metric volume measurements if it doesn't match the measurements on your cooking tools.
No point in using metric height and weight at the doctor if the form requests inches and pounds.
And so on. You just don't have a choice unless the government makes the switch mandatory. So you use it as it comes up: Metric for medicine, for example, but not to figure out your clothing for the day.
On the contrary Fahrenheit and Celsius is one of the harder units to convert. Can't just "halve and remove 10%" in your head like you can for pounds. Though I agree with you that you can't expect Americans to use SI units.
The scale factor is 9/5, which is close enough to 2 that the precision is fine for casual conversion (weather report, discussion of boiling tea on the web, …)
You forgot to subtract 32 first. Then you get 27. Or in this case, 54 happens to be evenly divisible by 9, so doing the exact conversion is relatively convenient (divide by nine, multiply by five).
Unfortunately, a lifetime in the U.S. has left me with poor intuition for Celsius. The conversion isn't difficult to do in ones head and for laboratory work, naturally, it's just as easy to read one thermometer scale as another. For everyday life, weather reports, fever thermometer readings, thermostats and such, it is just a nuisance to convert from Fahrenheit and back. If someone tells me it's 15 degrees C outside I have to do mental arithmetic to know if I should take a sweater. Furthermore, from a purely logical perspective perhaps we should even consider using Kelvin.
It's a completely different story for distance, weight and volume. Metric measurement in these cases are more intuitive for me, and they are clearly superior too. Millimeters are so much easier to use than fractions of an inch (7/32 inch -- that's a ridiculous system). In the U.S., an ounce of flour weighs less than an ounce of gold. Who even knows how much a grain of gunpowder is in units anyone else uses (one grain is approximately 1/16 gram). There are three teaspoons in one tablespoon, but only two cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart and 4 quarts in a gallon.
I'd be happy to switch from imperial to SI units for length, mass, and volume. I'll gladly switch slugs to kilograms and pounds to Newtons, but I will miss Fahrenheit.
As much as I prefer Celsius and have no idea what temperatures are in Fahrenheit, it seems quite obvious why people will use it - because it’s what one knows and what is used where one live.
Even as an Aussie I have to disagree with you here. The commenter at least put Fahrenheit in the degree.
People are allowed to communicate in a way that they're familiar with. If they have used F their entire life and so has everyone around them, then its fine.
The US demographic represents roughly 41% of Hacker News, I think its fine if they use their own measurement system.
This reads like someone copypasted a post from some audiophile forum, then replaced words to make it tea-themed :)
"The basically unlistenable hdmi cable has been only gold-plated once, and the direction of the signal is wrong". Haha, no offence, just made me smile
I got into green tea around 2014 (my how time flies) and I've had a lot of experiences.
Depending on how sensitive you are everything can change the taste, but IMO the big three are:
- water (huge, huge differences)
- type of tea (cultivar, when/ where it was harvested, steam time)
- brew temp and time
I eventually settled on a system where I heat filtered water in a regular pot with a meat thermometer to the right temp (this is usually between 155-170F depending on the specific tea), pour over tea into a glass pot (through stainless steel basket), brew from 30-60 seconds (again depending on tea), serve. I also measure the water, and weigh the tea on a scale.
It might sound convoluted and compared with like, brewing a kettle and dumping over a bag it is. I mostly drink earl grey now, probably as a result. In the summers it's a lot easier, I just dump tea in a pitcher of water and put it in the fridge overnight.
Also, I wholeheartedly recommend o-cha.com for tea and peripherals.
I read that soft and low mineral water makes the best tea and tried to use water with such values bought from market. It was trash. Tap water where I live is very hard and have a good taste and the tea is much better with it - so my experience contradicts what I found about the topic on the net.
Are there any objective parameters of water which makes a better green tea?
Honestly I'm not sure; I think it has to be down to personal preference. I once had tap water in the Midwest that made delicious tea, conversely NYC's famous water was fine. The variation, plus the bonkers amount of contaminants in tap water led me to get a tank with the "lead plus" or whatever filters. It's definitely more "sterile", but on the theory that lead, PFAS, a slurry of medications and a smattering of other minerals is delicious, I'm fine with that.
If we're talking japanese green tea, 50C for a very gentle taste、70~80C for a full taste are the basic directions, same as you'll get recommended by the tea makers themselves (an english site [0])
190F(85C) requires more timing control and get out the tea after less than a minute, while lower temperatures are more forgiving.
Caution is advised here. Teas can vary wildly from producer to producer, fixing methods and even from year to year and the extraction vessels, brewing methods and even the water heating and temp measuring methods play a significant role.
Anecdotal evidence:
The temps for my daily drinker (a deep steamed sencha) this year are 10°C lower (57) than last year. This is after keeping everything else constant.
Have you considered writing a blog or posting your thoughts about your experience and journey in finding the “perfect” tea brew? I’m sure your thoughts would save many amateurs a lot of frustrations. I, myself, am intrigued how nuanced the process is
It's still highly dependent on the specific tea. Definitely 190 I'd say is an absolute ceiling for green, but I have green teas I let nowhere near that - some even 170 max.
the german tea expert Ernst Janssen recommends to also use boiling water to prepare green tea as most of the teas are contaminated with germs and other things. different green tea brands including organic tea brands were tested by the renowned German test.de magazine and they confirmed that, also most of organic teas are contaminated. and since this is nothing you can easily check at home, better use boiling water.
That seems paranoid considering that I have never heard anyone getting food poisoning from tea, no matter how it was brewed.
edit: Reading the linked article, it seems mostly concerned about contaminants and not germs. Intuitively thinking, I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from leaves to the drink than lower temps?
The germ thing seems to go back to this 2005 press release by the BfR, which does indeed urge people to use boiling water to kill Salmonella particularly when preparing herbal tea. It doesn't cite any known cases or numbers: https://mobil.bfr.bund.de/de/presse/presseinformationen/2005...
Searching further, there were a couple of cases of Salmonella in infants in 2003 that were traced to fennel anise tea. The timing fits. I couldn't find anything more recent, but I didn't look very hard.
Here's more data from government sources. They tested tea and herbal tea in 2008, and found traces of Salmonella or E.coli in 2-3% of prosecute products, and mold in 20%. Doesn't differentiate between herbal and real tea.
I'm not worried. But then I usually use boiling water, or almost boiling water, which should be enough to kill micro organisms. And I'm sure I get more mold toxins from various other food sources without noticing it, cereals, nuts, processed foods etc. Tea is a dilution, after all.
The more sensitive "proper" teas are well into the danger zones e.g. gyokuros tend to be brewed between 50C and 60C, and with brewing times under 3mn.
Never really heard of hard thermal limits for herbals though, in my experience they're more resilient and less caring, and you can long-boil most of them like you'd do a middling black tea.
By that standard, you should be really careful with matcha — you mix it will non-bacteria-killing water and then drink the whole thing!
I don’t know whether most pathogenic bacteria can survive prolonged dry storage conditions, though. And, if you’re worried, you could likely pasteurize your fancy tea by heating it, dry, to 60C or so for a while.
I’m not even remotely worried about tea-borne salmonella, just pointing out that per your link for higher-grade green teas the brewing temperature x brewing time is well below what’d be needed to destroy it.
While I usually boil tea water, I just remembered I sometimes do cold brew tea (overnight with straight tap water). No gastrointestinal discomfort yet.
One thing to keep in mind is that some teas (as in made from Camellia Sinensis leaves) are processed using a pan/ceramic firing or steaming step to stop the leaves from oxidizing. I'm not sure how hot it gets but there is a heating step that might affect the viability of some pathogens.
It makes sense that herbal teas might be more susceptible to pathogen contamination if they don't go through that.
Of course there's plenty of steps along the way to contaminate tea, and chemical contaminants are different. But boiling water isn't the only heating step for some teas.
Having said that, I generally just use boiling or near boiling water for all my tea. I've tried all sorts of combinations of temps with many many different varieties of tea and have decided that the tea variety, amount used per serving, and length of steeping make much more of a difference than the temperature. I also think I just like bold-flavored tea (I do like bitter flavors quite a bit, and have been known to seek them out even when I was too young to really be aware of a pattern with it).
A person I know had to get tested for toxins at work regularly and at some point showed really high arsenic levels. At which point they had to figure out what poisoned him. He worked in material science but no materials he handled would have given off arsenic to his body. After some investigating, they found out that the Pu'Erh tea he consumed was the culprit. They tested the tea in a lab and after he stopped drinking it, his levels became normal.
So that might not kill.you but I guess having these toxins in you body cannot be good either.
Since then I try to only buy teas which are lab-tested. When I lived in Germany I bought my teas at sunday. Tbey tell you harvest, growing conditions and many more things and they also claim to lab test the tea badges.
I haven't found anything comparable in the US yet.
Colloquially, "food poisoning" refers exclusively to (per Wikipedia) "Foodborne illness (also foodborne disease and food poisoning); any illness resulting from the spoilage of contaminated food by pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites."
You might want to use water with high level of iron though. My grandfather used to use arsenic to brew cider because its local water had really high levels of iron.
Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about.
As for boiling tea for sanitation, I took a wilderness first responder class and they taught us that you could bring water to a boil at any altitude a human can breath at (without holding it at a boil for 15 minutes as some claim) and it's considered sterilized. In Cusco, that would be around 191F/89C (humans can breathe quite a bit higher up than Cusco). Not a bad tea-brewing temp!
Also, I suggest trying kukicha. It's high in l-theanine and lower in caffeine. Tasty too.
If you source your green tea from a Japanese tea farm, this is really not a concern. Farm workers all wear gloves and masks, and the tea leaves are harvested directly from the tea bushes to a net via a machine.
Additionally, the tea plants are covered by cloth for up to a month before harvest, dramatically reducing the chances of bird droppings.
They are also steamed, rolled, and dried by mechanical devices which remove virtually all moisture.
Not really. Most microbes will be dead in a minute at about 70C. Milk pasteurization is done at 60C, after all. Most importantly, it'll kill salmonella.
Some hardy bugs and/or spores can survive regular boiling anyway, so you're not aiming for total sterilization.
It would be a really cool coincidence if the temperature at which water boils happened to be the magic number that killed most bacteria (unless it killed them because it boiled water they depend on to function or something), but I don't think that's the case - I think that boiling is something that's easy for humans to do and to perceive that also happens to be above the safe threshold and kill enough of the bacteria that harm us to make it a useful break point, even if the actual 212* isn't especially relevant.
Unfortunately the bacteria that can survive drying-out are also the ones that survive boiling, so unless you're going to boil your tea in a pressure cooker it's not much help.
We'd be drinking gamma ray sanitized tea if that had really been a problem. Honestly it sounds like mercury scare in seafood and pourover rice cooking for arsenic reduction, just not-invented-here behavior.
> Intuitively thinking, I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from
> leaves to the drink than lower temps?
If we're discussing non-volatiles such as heavy metals, boiling acually concentrates them by removing some of the water. This is more of a concern with the water than with the tea, however if one is already bringing up the health aspects then obviosly neither can be ignored.
It’s not a matter of food poisoning, it’s a matter of do you really want to ingest contaminants. Regular consumption of contaminants such as pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics (all present in the water supply especially at lower elevations) has an impact on long term health.
Yes this doesn’t really make sense unless it would denature any toxins which doesn’t seem that likely and will do nothing for any pesticide or heavy metal contamination except possibly extract more.
All foodstuffs are contaminated with germs, unless you go to extraordinary effort to prevent it (e.g. intense gamma radiation.) Unless there is some particular reason to care (you're a hospital feeding people who had their bone marrow nuked by cancer/chemo), then the correct solution is to stop caring. Who ever heard of people dropping dead because they brewed their tea with sub-boiling water? This isn't happening, it's not something you should worry about.
That's widely understood, but I hope nobody is boiling their salads in response to that statistic. Maybe tomorrow I'll trip on my shoelace and crack my skull open on the sidewalk, but I'm not going to wear a helmet just in case. There is an endless supply of extremely low probability ways to die, but if you spend your time worrying about all that crap you'll ironically hasten your own demise by stressing yourself out. Round those small possibilities down to zero and stop worrying about it.
Oddly, the restaurants are gone, but there is salsa using the brand in some supermarkets still. I wouldn't buy it, even though it presumably is just someone else using the logo.
This is faulty reasoning. The typical "almost boiling" temperature of 185F for 3 minutes will sterilize the tea just as well as boiling water would. There's absolutely no benefit in terms of safety. The only consideration would be flavor.
While I get the logic, it feels a lot like a "cook your salad to get rid of potential pathogens" strategy. Sure it's safer, but did you really want to boil your salad ?
There surely must be other ways to get probably safe food than boiling everything you drink.
Boiling doesn't even kill most things. I worked in a biolab for a while and used an autoclave to sterilize objects. It basically means we pressure cooked stuff at 130°C for 45min or so. And even that doesn't destroy some dangerous stuff like prions.
I think one questions that people here might be having is how is the water of correct temperature is actually prepared. Do people just know how to heat water to 60C? That sounds unlikely, doesn't it?
In traditional tea ceremony, known amount of tap water is added to boiling water. Comes out okay if protocol is punctually followed.
In more casual situations, there are buttons and lamps on electric kettles to cycle through common temperatures. That works if you are going to serve dozen guests at once.
There's a lot of factors to it. The way the leaves are processed, the quality/freshness of the leaves, ratio of leaf to water, steeping time.
I think in general it's safest to brew green teas at 175f. But I'm doing quick gongfu brewing sessions with a late-march sichuan green tea, and it tastes great at 205f. Less intense at the usual 175f, but picks up more subtle flavors.
Varities of Chinese and Japanese green teas differ in their processing techniques so much that they require different preparation techniques as well. They possess distinctly different flavours, too.
Most Japanese green teas are steamed past the harvest time – lightly (gyokuro), or more thoroughly (sencha), or anywhere in between depending on the grade – and some varieties can also be roasted (e.g. yabukita). Japanese green tea generally requires milder water temperatures for a preparation. Typically, the higher is the grade, the lower is the temperature, e.g. from 60ºC for gyokuro and high grade matcha to 80ºC for sencha. Gyokuro and matcha, prepared at the right or slightly lower temperature, has a lot umami flavour with a little bit of sweetness in it.
Varieties of the Chinese green tea is either lightly roasted (without being steamed nowadays) or lightly fermented. They need higher water temperatures, typically in a range between 80ºC and 90ºC. High grade Dragon Well prepared at the 80ºC temperature has a unique flavour that I don't know describe, but it will have almost no flavour is a lower temperature is used.
Matcha started out on the mainland and came to Japan. As my Taiwanese dealer once said to an audience, she was grateful the Japanese still do matcha or she worried the technique and style would have been lost.
Not to say they make it exactly the same, I wouldn’t know, but the origin is China.
How do you get to sleep? I’ve tried tea at various times as a substitute for an evening alcoholic beverage but the caffeine hinders my sleep. I already drink too much coffee before 10am, so adding more caffeine later in the evening has been a problem when I’ve tried it.
Kukicha (though it still has some caffeine), hojicha, rooibos, various other tisanes. Though, the caffeine content of anything that isn't red tea / puerh doesn't effect me much, and there are a lot of good decaf options.
I would also assume multiple brewings will see caffeine levels drop off sharply.
I suffer from chronic insomnia, and I certainly didn't notice the afternoons and evenings spent on a pot of good oolong to be any worse than the same with herbal or rooibos.
And 65-75°C is a safe bet for almost all greens. Germs won't survive on dried herbs with no access to water.
Bacterial spores can survive on dry stuff and these can be inactivated by high temperatures, but 65°C should do. Also, we humans have this cool ability to raise body temperature to kill unwelcome stuff, so we're good until cordyceps evolves.
Toxins on the other hand, may be able to survive even boiling.
Go for 65-75°C and don't ever taste bitter green tea.
Just in case you wanted to optimize your extraction technique: "The optimal conditions for extracting theanine from green tea using water were found to be extraction at 80 °C for 30 min with a water-to-tea ratio of 20:1 mL/g and a tea particle size of 0.5-1 mm."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21735551/
It all depends so much on the tea. There are many, many varieties of green tea.
My goto for an "average" green tea is a maximum of 70C and for most other teas (Oolong, Red etc.) it's 95C but the temperature is only one variable. Leaf to water ratio and steeping time are the other two. I usually brew Gongfu style (more leaf, shorter steeping times). For a nice Gyokuro on the low end of the temperature scale, I usually go with 50C and 6g/100ml of water/120 seconds steep and then increase the time in 30 second increments for the next two brews. After that I increase the temperature to about 70 degrees to squeeze out another brew or two but it's the first three that I'm really after :)
My goto "lazy" green is a Long Jing which can take hotter water (I usually go to around 80C) and it's just my daily tea so I usually brew it "western" style 0.6g/100ml, 2min first brew, 3min second brew.
It's a lot of fun to experiment with different teas and do comparison tastings (I did this quite a bit for white tea with the same tea brewed at different temperatures, steeping time etc.). But beware, it can turn into a bit of an obsession :)
And don't forget to smell the tea and leaves after brewing. It's one of the nicest things about a good cup of tea.
I don't think their analysis about caffeine is correct and doesn't cite sources. I've seen a lower temperature for a longer time more often being ideal for maximizing caffeine vs other components in pubmed research on teas, I.e.:
If one does a lower temperature for a longer time it is often also equivalent to boiling for a very short time a.f.a pathogens. I think the relative bitterness is probably higher for higher temperature brews after normalizing on caffeine.
All teas have "optimal" temperatures and brew times. A lot of green teas do not work well being boiled into bitter disappointment. Before I had to give up caffeine, I recall Gunpowder green tea being less tricky to get right. :)
> A common myth regarding green tea is that it shouldn’t be prepared with boiling water. This is absolutely false[...]
Seems to contradict the rest of the article...
> So the best way to prepare gyokuro, a green tea with a high amino acid content, is with lukewarm or even cold water.
> Sencha can be prepared with hot water for best results. Using boiling water would make it too bitter and astringent.
> Lower grade teas like bancha, genmaicha and houjicha, have a light taste and don’t have much amino acids anyway. Thus, they can be prepared with boiling water.
I guess it's saying that this isn't always true, but the headline would probably mislead people into ruining high-end tea with boiling water. And I don't see any upside to using it for low-end green tea.
Re-read the article. Different teas require different preparations for "best results". Some teas work better with boiling water, others with lower temperature water.
What I took from the article was that there appears to be a rule (I am imagining because I'm not a green tea expert) that green tea should never be prepared using boiling water when in fact, as the writer states, is false. As in "it depends".
And near the end of the article they state:
"However, you should prepare tea in the way that works best for you. If you want to boil your sencha because you want it to be very bitter and astringent, by all means go ahead."
I don't see any contradictions.
It's like coffee, different beans, different roasting of those beans, different grinding of those beans will mean there is no one true way to get the best extraction, and your preferred extraction might differ from another's extraction method.
No, it's absolutely false because those teas are completely legit because in this case lower grade doesn't mean crappy. If it did that would be reasonable advice to give.
If you tell someone never to drink those lower grade teas you're doing them a disservice and that's the only situation in which the advice about never using boiling water would apply.
But does non-boiling water not work well with lower-grade tea? I drink that stuff all the time and find it best with ~180˚F water. Seems like it's reasonable to just never use boiling water for green tea.
I drink ridiculous amounts of English Breakfast tea with 1% milk every day. The water HAS to be boiling when it hits the tea. You cn really tell the difference if the water is less than boiling. Same but more subtle with green tea imo
British teas tend to select blander batches of tea (said the retired British tea consultant who did a workshop at a tea festival years ago).
If you’re making Earl Grey, the bergamot is a lot of your cost per serving. A bold tea requires more bergamot for the same flavor balance. So bland tea, bergamot-forward flavor.
what does absolutely awful mean to you? i've made green and black tea in the same way and don't have a problem with either, but i've learned in my years that i'm much less averse to bitter than most people.
Do you actually drink not-bottom-of-the-barrel sencha? If not, your experience is not applicable, respectfully. With even middle-of-the-road sencha the difference is far from subtle.
15% of people don't taste bitterness in the same way. Hops taste floral and a bit sweet to me and I like to chew on Artemisia species my family finds hideously bitter. I could put cheap gunpowder green tea in a percolator for an hour and it wouldn't taste bitter to me. Perhaps the gp has the same trait?
Maybe that's true, but arguing that putting boiling water on decent (i.e. not bancha or genmaicha or whatever) japanese green tea is a weird, minority opinion for a good reason. Also, gunpowder greens are not japanese.
i suppose i'm in that 15%. i sometimes drink a tea made from a fresh hop cone to help me sleep. it's not so much that i don't taste bitter, just that i'm not averse to a lot of the flavors people call bitter (and there are a lot of flavors people call bitter.)
i don't know if it's related but i've also noticed i'm much more tolerant of ginger than most people and i can't taste cardamom (seed of the ginger plant, interestingly) at all.
I’m a bitter taster. There are some strains of loose leaf green tea that are my go to. One I confused with jasmine tea the first time I had it. Black tea is a vehicle for caffeine, as is coffee. Earl Grey is five kinds of bitter at once ans somehow gets a pass, but only in small quantities. English breakfast once in a while, but the rest is chai.
Even most bottom-of-the-barrel sencha taste awful in boiling hot water, and this is vice versa; bottom-of-the-barrel black tea in not-boiling hot water tastes just as awful.
"green tea" is an English term which essentializes Asamushi, Chumushi, and Fukamushi versions of Sencha, Gyokuro, Matcha, Bancha, Genmaicha, Hojicha, Kukicha, Shincha, Tamaryokucha, Kamairicha, Konacha, Mecha, Guricha, Hentaigama, Batabatacha, Wakocha, Karigane, Tencha, Aracha, Yanagi, not to mention the regional specializations.
Aside from matcha (powdered), konacha (powdered), hojicha (brown) and perhaps kukicha (twigs), most (all?) of the other ones are also just sencha, or loose-leaf green tea.
Shincha would just refer to freshly picked sencha, for one.
"Green tea" would be 緑茶 (ryokucha). Hojicha is not ryokucha nor green.
That is another way of needlessly essentializing the complexity.. though your distinction between matcha and sencha is not internally coherent with your own ontology.
Matcha and Sencha are the same plant, only differing in growing conditions and processing.
I didn't make this up; look it up in the dictionary or ask a native speaker.
Several of these words are talking about different aspects of tea. A shincha (fresh) gyokuro (variety+growing method) genmaicha (rice-puffs added; technically doesn't have to involve green tea) is still a sencha (plant+processing) and therefore a ryokucha (plant+color). Listing fukamushi as a "sencha type", but shincha as distinct from sencha, while calling houjicha "green tea" is incorrect and coupled with some quite obscure ones, you just seem to be dropping words without substance. It's like calling rose a "red wine".
(obv all of these words are the same plant species)
Just like with wine there can be no-end to nitpicking if you're looking for it but you don't need to know anything at all to appreciate it and find what you personally enjoy regardless of what snobs would tell you. You started it, though ;)
You're my spirit animal now. I drink massive amounts of strong black tea with milk and I agree, has to be absolutely boiling and I preheat the teapot.
At work I put a teabag in hot water and zap it in the microwave for 20-30s, key to driving out the flavor into the water.
I don't like green tea but I would think that you should experiment with whatever temp gives you the extraction you need. Don't listen to experts is rule #1 when it comes to brewing.
The current bag I have, Rosamonte brand, seems to require freshly boiled, right out of the kettle water to get a good extraction.
The last bag I had was bitter if you used just boiled water, you had to let it go down in temp a bit to get a good brew.
I should probably buy a bunch of mates and check the dates to see if that's a variable I've not accounted for. Usually I know how to deal with a bag of it after making the first drink.
As I get older I notice my senses get less refined and weaker, especially smell and taste, and especially after a couple covid infections. This on top off constant distraction and stress makes it nearly impossible for me to taste any subtlety in things like coffee and tea and wine. To be frank I'm jealous of these people that can dedicate all this time and passion to various techniques and flavors.
From experience, if it’s not a passion or priority, it helps externalize the decision process. Have a friend (or online service) who does the research for you. Then you buy the minimum equipment (a temperature controlled kettle and a strainer) and a few teas. When you get time, brew them to the instructions. If you have some free time, you can start it with a cup of tea.
There no need to get massively invested.
This is how I learned to paint minis. All I did was buy some unpainted ones and drop by a friend’s place. He has all of the supplies and equipment. All of my unpainted minis are in his closet. :)
Edit: By having a friend, I mean if you have a friend who is into tea/coffee/wine/etc. I enjoy hanging out with people who have hobbies I wouldn’t pick up on my own.
Yep. There's one guy at work who's kinda quiet, but one day he noticed me drinking tea. Turns out he knows a lot about Chinese tea and buys it online (helps that he's from China and familiar with the provinces), so he's given me a lot of recommendations and it's become a fun topic to discuss.
Just be cognisant that it is entirely optional to care. And it is a free choice to care in whichever way you want (you might simply have a preferred supermarket tea brand).
Definitely. I don’t bake and even through I have the skills to. Cooking is an occasional thing done for purely utilitarian purposes, even through I could and have done a lot more.
The article misses the other very important points - brewing time, and water:leaf ratio.
The taste of your tea depends a lot on the quality of the leaves. I've used a wide range of Sencha leaves, some of them absolutely hate high temperatures beyond 70℃ while some others happily brew in 85℃.
Brewing times can drastically affect the bitterness of the tea even at lower temperatures because of how the catechins are extracted. In my experience, the first 30-60 seconds can make or break the taste - this is when the temperature must be just right.
I've got a variation to tweak my tea's taste by starting to brew at a slightly lower temperature for about 60-90 seconds and then adding some water at 85-90℃ at this point and letting it brew a bit longer. Some types of sencha teas respond well to this approach, and I feel this brings out a little more of its caffeine content and a hint of bitter / astringent flavours while not overwhelming the overall taste.
It also depends on what you're trying to achieve with the tea. Using the exact same leaves, I sometimes like to brew a very mild warm tea, and at other times the same leaves can be brewed at a higher temperature for a more full bodied tea.
My approach is to experiment with a new batch of leaves to quickly identify its boundaries re: temperature and time, and that gives me a lot of room to play with and experiment :)
I am a tea worm, I use to consume several kg of tea annually. I have often saw recommendation to not overheat tea over some degree of Celsius but when I try this I found the tea not ready. In fact I use to do opposite: I preheat the cup or teapot before throw some tea in it for making the tea even hotter.
> I am a tea worm, I use to consume several kg of tea annually.
Is it japanese green tea? Because that's what the article is about, if you're drinking black tea, or chinese teas, that is utterly irrelevant: they are different cultivars, selected and grown differently, with different harvesting and processing, and different brewing methods and temperatures.
You might well be Spiff and still have no useful input.
When I’ve had loose leaf tea poured for me, the first steep went down the drain. That achieves much the same thing, also gets rid of the little bits that can get stuck in your teeth.
Japanese green teas are not usually steeped multiple times (though most will allow for a few steepings, and a few are designed for that).
This sounds a lot more like chinese teas, which are designed for multiple short steepings (gongfu ceremony) and more or less require a rinsing first steep.
You know it’s the same plant right? There’s only so many ways you can prepare and handle wine. The real variety comes from using other plants for the fermentation.
Yes, exactly like "potato" or "apple" is always the same plant, and they don't each have literally thousands of different cultivars bred for different purposes and use cases.
Oh wait.
> There’s only so many ways you can prepare and handle wine. The real variety comes from using other plants for the fermentation.
Ignoring that neither of these is true, you have hardly given any hint at any sort of knowledge and understanding of the "only so many ways" of preparing and handling anything, be it wine, potatoes, or tea.
Temperature, length of brewing, water hardness all affect the taste.
Boiling water gives the tea a bitter taste. Trying brewing gyokuro with boiling water in front of a Japanese. Both the Japanese and the tea grow bitter because of it. The effect is very prominent.
Houjicha and bancha are low end tea. (Btw, are they even considered green tea?) Do whatever you want with them. It's like choosing the best glass for a table wine, it doesn't really matter.
Black tea, on the other hand, is more forgiving in brewing.
Tangentially, how popular is green tea in the UK? It seems quite niche?
Try brewing yerba mate in front of an Argentinean/Paraguayam, using using a thermal bottle. Also, boil the water in an electric kettle and pour a bit of cold water on the bottle to bring back the temperature to 80°C
They'll go bananas on how mate isn't served like that, on how you ruined it, etc.
But you can do it like that just fine. And it can be perfectly brewed like that and the taste will be the same.
People just like treating their ceremonies like shaolin kung fu.
Green tea in the UK isn’t a staple like black tea is but it is still quite common. All supermarkets tend to carry a good range of teas including green, jasmine, mint and chamomile.
I once read about a japanese method for green tea. The first cup is for the enemy, brewed with boiling water for a few seconds to pull out the bitterness and discarded. The second is for a good friend and the third is for you.
My brother once told me, that a japanese professor measured how much of the healthy substances gets drawn out at all temperatures. He found 60°C to be optimal.
I used 80°C for 2nd & 3rd brewing though, since i really dislike the taste at 70°C and lower.
I tried this over the weekend, different temperatures worked better for different teas which is frustrating, also I found the best tea was to prepare two pots, one boiled and one on the cooler side of lukewarm and then mix together the results, favouring slightly the cooler prepared tea.
I am EXTREMELY disappoint that the Caffeine produced by the plant to defend itself from pests, and also alters my brain chemistry such that hormones emitted by tired neurons are ignored... doesn't kill the bacteria :'(
For all lazy matcha makers, I’d recommend getting a milk frother: it heats up water and also mixes matcha powder. For those who like matcha lattes, I think it’s even more essential as frothing milk makes it more sweet and fluffy.
It depends on the green, though. Good-quality green tea from China can often withstand higher temperatures or long brewing, to the point where it's normal to just pinch some tea in a mug and refill with hot water throughout the day.
I wouldn't say it is matter of quality; or rather lot of high-quality teas can still be quite sensitive to high temps. Gyokuros mentioned in the article are good example
Please re-read my post that I said from China specifically. Gyokuro, a green tea primarily of japanese make and style, does not apply to what I said. I'm thinking of gan lu or mao jian style teas.
I've always read that you don't use boiling water because it destroys the catechins which provide the majority of the health benefits of drinking green tea.
I've always enjoyed the bite of bitter, astringent green tea. The tannin flavor just grabs my palate. Probably not for everyone, but it doesn't ruin it for me.
The title is misleading. It has nothing to do with boiling, but rather with temperature. Where I live, boiling water is well below 90°C and does not ruin green tea.
I think I am loosing my taste buds - my preference is for gunpowder tannin flavor, which I get by pouring whatever the hottest water setting is on my pot ~208F.
There are so many blog posts about green tea being healthy.
Every time I tried some its taste was revolting (like drinking dirty feet water), and it created a rough feeling in my throat.
I usually drink peppermint and/or camomile. If not solo, the mix must be 50/50 or it also tastes like old socks.
I also like various fruit teas, or blends like orange and curcuma, rose hip/hybiscus.
As a European I don't understand the green tea hype.
I’m not sure why that would have been your experience. Decent, well-prepared green tea should have a very mild grassy flavor and aroma. Possibly, as far as the rough feeling in your throat, the tea was prepared with too hot water or steeped too long, which releases astrigent chemicals as described in this fine article.
Maybe? It’s like blooming coffee, it makes a difference, but how much does that matter to the specific drinker? The same goes for water temp.
I found that I could tell the difference but for tea I regularly drink I couldn’t be bothered to break out a thermometer. But if it’s the good stuff I totally would be doing more of the ritual.
I think you're confusing boiling with searing. I guess anything could be a carcinogen at the right dosage but generally the advice is not to sear meat because that results in carinogenic particles. There is a similar process in deep frying.
But boiling is a different process, especially with tea where even if the water is boiling when poured it will rapidly cool down below the boiling point. As the article explains, boiling water extracts different substances to different degrees than warm/hot water. Specifically it will extract more of the bitter-tasting compounds and can break down others.
I meant that the matcha powder probably has pollutants which might get decreased by boiling it, as the article suggests, but that would ruin the flavor.
tl;dr: YES. Mostly. A few varieties are alright or maybe even good with boiling water. Houjicha is one that you're fairly likely to encounter (the kinda-roasty / toasted tasting tea you get in many restaurants).
But for the vast majority of green teas: heck no, it'll taste awful.
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