Making a Better Cup of Tea

[jesse_the_k]

I love tea—I drink a gallon a day. I drink from a thick, 16-oz, glass, better to warm my hands with. I use a tablespoon of loose tea in a single-use paper tea filter bag.

I'm lucky my local co-op carries many delicious loose teas. I adore Rishi tea (from Milwaukee)¹, particularly their Iron Goddess of Mercy Oolong, Jade Green, and Mahgreb Mint Green, as well as my own special mix².

I've discovered that tea tastes so much better when it's brewed at the right temperature. Oolong brewed at 175° or Green at 165° is delicious. (Boiling water is the right temp for mint tea and other herbals.)

This blog post explains how to judge water temperature by evaluating the bubbles in the pot:

https://www.thespruce.com/how-to-brew-tea-water-temperatures-766316

and since I have a clear glass kettle, I followed those rules for a while.

Then I realized there was a simpler way: pouring the hot water between glasses until it's cooled to the right temp. You'll have to get an accurate thermometer to develop the right technique, but from then on it's something even I can do in my pre-caffeinated morning stupor.

With my tall glasses and kitchen temperature, I need to pour once from the boiling kettle, into a glass, then four more times between glasses, and then finally pour the cooled water on the (wet) teabag and steep for a minute. Six pours results in 175° tea for my Oolong. One more pour cools it down enough for Green tea.

Why do I use a tablespoon? Short brewing times and more tea provide a more delicate flavor. I can also get four full glasses of tea from that bag.

Are you a tea drinker? What kind do you like, and why?

---

1. https://www.rishi-tea.com ↩︎
2. details in another post ↩︎

Comments

[monanotlisa]

TEA POST LOVE!

[jesse_the_k]

Amen! Tell me about your tea feelings, please.

Late that same day.

[jesse_the_k]

Okay,, I just backread your extensive tea tag and I'm so jealous of you living near tea experts of the highest order. The Asian food shops hereabouts only sell bagged teas. On the plus side there are two real tea shops, soup to nuts, white to bubble.

[loligo]

Here via Mona -- so, do you pour back and forth between the same two glasses, or is each pour into a fresh glass? I realize that with a thermometer, I could customize it either way, but I just want to get a rough estimate of how much heat you're losing to the air and how much to the vessels.

[jesse_the_k]

Back & forth between two identical glasses--would love to hear your results.

[decemberthirty]

A gallon! At first that sounded like a lot, but now that I think about it, I wonder if I drink that much per day--or on some days, anyway. I've never calculated my tea consumption. I know it's lower in summer, since I don't usually want a hot drink when I'm already hot, but I bet I've drunk as much as a gallon on certain days in winter....

I am almost exclusively a black tea drinker. I mostly like Indian blacks like Assam and Nilgiri, but I also love a good Yunnan.

[jesse_the_k]

It does seem a lot but it's medically indicated: Keeping my blood volume high keeps me from fainting. (Also doctor has instructed me to eat ALL THE SALT I want. I dip my apple slices in miso.)

After noon I switch tthe herbals. iced anything makes my teeth hurt, so Luke warm tea all through the day suits me fine.

Mmmmm Assam. I'm stretching the limits of good sense when it comes to the amount of caffeine in my Oolong morning, so Assam is only for special outings to the better tea shop. Which reminds me, I'm overdue.

[ironymaiden]

the kind i drink the most is Moroccan Mint (green tea blended with mint). i first fell in love with the way it's served traditionally (super-high pour into glasses, lots of honey) then came to enjoy it as an everyday that had a bit of caffiene but not so much that i would be vibrating away, and really tasty without the honey.

[jesse_the_k]

I have luckily shared your exact trajectory. Maghreb Mint has green tea, mint, and very carefully chosen spices--a lighter approach to chai--including cardamom and licorice, which adds just the right sweet finish.

[redbird]

Mostly I'm drinking a black Assam—either a specific golden Assam I get from a place in Greenwich Village, or an Irish breakfast if I'm not home or want the convenience of teabags. (I like Twinings' and MEM's Irish breakfast blends; I think MEM is Boston-area local.) I'm steeping it at very close to boiling temperature (probably about 95 C/just over 200 F), by just pouring boiling water over tea leaves and letting that sit for about four minutes before removing the tea leaves.

I'll drink any of those with milk and sugar; the loose Assam I'm also happy to drink black, which is what I do when I want to take a thermos of tea with me.

I'm drinking it partly for the caffeine, meaning I drank quite a bit of the Tazo "Awake" blend (an English breakfast with slightly more subtlety than a Pan-galactic gargleblaster) when that was the Starbucks house brand, because for all its flaws, Starbucks can be counted on to actually boil the water, unlike many restaurants and fast-food joints. Interestingly, there's no correlation between how fancy a place is, and whether they know the basic of how to make tea: I get annoyed at places that expect me to be impressed by a box of different teabags next to a pot or even cup of no-longer-boiling water.

I could go on further, but am trying to spare my fingers right now.

[jesse_the_k]

Oh you're so right about the tepid water issue. given up ordering anything but plain peppermint at mundane restaurants. They have no clue!

[redbird]

I've found that some do: the diner nearest my home back in New York, for example, usually kept a pot of water at the boil, and poured the water over the tea bag before bringing it to me. It wasn't remotely fancy tea, but plain Lipton's made that way is at least drinkable. My favorite ice cream place (in Cambridge, Mass.) also gets it right, and has a choice of good teas. Tosci's isn't a mundane restaurant, but the coffee, tea, and pastries are a sideline: they're mostly an ice cream parlor. So there's a certain amount of trial and error involved.

[wendelah1]

I drink black tea in the afternoon for a pick-me-up, and for comfort, of course. I've tried many different teas but I always come back to PG Tips. This is how my taste buds think tea is supposed to taste. I don't follow any temperature rules other than boiling the water in my electric tea kettle, but I do use filtered water. I like it with 1 tsp. of milk and one lump of sugar. That's the way I drink it because that's how my dad took his tea (because that's the way his dad drank his tea and so on and so forth). I prefer china cups to mugs, for aesthetics.

I drink herbal teas primarily for medicinal purposes. Lemon ginger tea for indigestion. Honey chamomile tea for anxiety. Traditional Medicinals makes a range of teas for upper respiratory infections: Throat Care, Cold Care, Breathe Easy, which I like very much.

I'm from California so I'll drink iced tea all day long, all year round, but unless my husband gets motivated, it's a restaurant beverage of choice. I'm too lazy to make it for myself. Oh, and my mom is originally from North Carolina so I do love me some Sweet Tea--but only the way my Aunt Barbara made it. She just had the knack, what can I say.

[jesse_the_k]

Ive just educated myself on the lively history of PG Tips. I've tasted it once, and it was a taste as sturdy and delicate as a garden trellis. I can understand why some folks drink it night & day.

My Mississippi sojourn this January introduced me to sweet tea, as well as "unsweet tea," both cold of course. On the advice of a Southerner, I was able to produce darn tasty ice tea with some Louisanne brand tea bags (even decaffeinated). So smooth!

[toft]

Finding out about the different temperatures for tea was a revolution for me. I usually just bung a bit of cold water into my mug for green and white teas, I must admit - I'm not very careful about it. I increasingly love grassy-flavoured green teas but I'm starting to branch out into black tea. I love earl grey; I recently had a smoky-flavoured black tea called ken mun ? which was delicious. There are some really fantastic tea shops in my city which I have to stay away from because I can spend SO much money in them.

Keemun (sp)

[jesse_the_k]

...is something I've tasted and liked a lot. But it's got too much caffeine ::sobs::

My go-to tea when I could tolerate infinite caffeine* was "Russian Caravan," a mix of lapsang souchang and "less smoky tea." The mix varies wildly by the source: I've had it with oolong, assam, and keemun.

* or ill-informed about what caffeine was doing to me

Re: Keemun (sp)

[toft]

Ohh, I wondered what Russian Caravan was. Thank you! Now that I've discovered I like smoky flavoured tea, maybe I'll try it next time I see it. I'm sorry caffeine is no good for you! That is sad.

A coffee shop near us does an iced Rooibos Provence which is surprisingly delicious. I've previously only had a version which has artificial sweetener, which was gross, but rooibos plus lavender and nothing else turns out to be very nice. Do you ever drink rooibos? I'm not wild about the red kind, which always tastes to me like oatmeal, but I quite like the gentler green kind, especially with mint or chamomile added.

Re: Keemun (sp)

[jesse_the_k]

Russian caravan is strong stuff: just the tea to drink when you're riding your sledge through a snowstorm.

I've had mixed success with roibos teas. Roibos can be lovely in combination. I didn't know green roibos existed. Straight up brown reminds me of cork; not an option I seek out.

Rishi's West Cape Chai manages to be truly boilable (as well as the typical tea brew) and no cork fragrance nor taste. But I'm old fashioned: Chai requires black tea.

I do like Adagio's honey bush mixes -- one vanilla, one hazelnut -- which are the same botanical, still tan-orange, but much less bark-like. They're standard in my post-noon rotation.

I had a (Harvey?) pyramid teabag peppermint roibos which brewed to a dark green and was delicious: more bottom than the ethereality of mint tea alone. Maybe that was green roibos?

I'd love to go to a tea con!

Re: Keemun (sp)

[toft]

I would LOVE a tea con.

I used to have an earl grey rooibos which was delicious.

[tablesaw]

I drink the most tea at work, when I have the least control over how well I can make it, so I gravitate toward things that I have found hard to mess up. My favorite is genmaicha, which I can usually pick up at local supermarkets. On weekends, I like to make a nice big pot of assam and drink it all day as it slowly turns into iced tea.

ETA: This is also a great temperature techinque, and it may get me back into trying white tea, which I have typically ruined, whether at work or home.

[jesse_the_k]

Genmaicha! That was my first serious tea, and it changed my life.

Your house must have serious air conditioning to create iced tea before nightfall :,)

I tried white tea with a thermometer and always ended up savagely overbrewed. It's a breeze now, and white teas are fascinating and subtle. I like the focus they require.