Tea Times

[digitaldiscipline]

So, cassandrasimplx got me the Adagio "ingenuitea" loose leaf brew cup and an assortment of green teas to make use of it with for my birthday. I've just brewed my next-to last cup of the first packet I opened, "anji duet."

My response is going to be colored by my longstanding preference for slightly doctored hot water and leaf concoctions; my usual fare is bagged green tea, with or without various fruit infusions (blueberry, blackberry, pomegranate, acai, whatever) or those nylon pyramid black teas with different fruity things (blueberry, pomegranate, orange, hibiscus, vanilla, etc).

"Tea is a vehicle for honey" is my SOP, but I've been drinking this new stuff straight, though I admit to doing a somewhat poor job of following the brewing directions/suggestions on the packet (tea snobs, clutch your pearls tightly!) Because, let's face it, I get interrupted incessantly at the office, so hitting a consistent 60/90/120/180 seconds or whatever is recommended brew time is luck at best, and I have no real control over the temperature of the water that comes out of the coffeemaker... nor, at this point, do I actually give a fuck. I am a troglodyte and cretin who believes that tea can damn well steep until I get around to decanting it.

In any case, the anji duet was nice, if a tad astringent (see aforementioned brewing shortcomings on my part, prescribed for 120sec @ 180F). It's not overly floral or woody, but has a bit more of that going on than something like your average box o' bags of inexpensive black tea. The second brew from the same leaves is, to my palate, a bit milder and, while "sweet" isn't the word I'd use, certainly entirely palatable.

There are three other offerings in the Adagio sampler; next up is "gyokuro."

Comments

[jola.livejournal.com]

i brew Russian style - loose leaves in the pot w/ the water, bring to boil and then leave to steep for about 20 minutes, strain and drink ... no sugar or honey. maybe lemon if i'm feeling fiddly.

I laugh at directions. My tea is strong enough to kick a mule through a fucking barnyard door.

[kambriel.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I don't think I've "followed directions" for tea... ever & it still turns out great every time. Directions are for wimps says this Sicilian gal ;)

[feyrieprincess.livejournal.com]

www.silkroadteas.com

Artisan hand picked teas from China. Astoundingly cheap. Brought to US twice yearly by a guy who has spent the past 30 years cultivating relationships with small traditional tea growing families and talking the Chinese government into allowing him to purchase from these people. Also convincing customs to allow the importation of puerh teas.

There is actually a Netflix documentary about it.

Hands down the best source for teas.

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

The "instructions" just tell you what conditions the manufacturer thinks show the tea off at its best. Since "best" is a subjective assessment, it's more important that you make the tea in a way that's convenient for you to do every time, so you can expect it to be reliably the same from cup to cup. Whether that's boiling it for 20 minutes and adding lemon (hardcore!) or letting the teabag sit until the water's too cold to really count as steeping it any more (lazy!) or discarding the first brew and enjoying the second, it still means finding for yourself your own comfort niche in the tea equivalent of the huge sanity zone between drinking Mad Dog from the corner store and having a team of people who scour vineyards and auctions for the Very Best Wines to keep your extensive cellar well-stocked.

The Anji Duet (http://www.adagio.com/green/anji_duet.html) is, in theory, a close relative of the flavor family the fruit-infused pyramid bags belong to:

A light, delicate cup with soft fruit notes like a fine white tea, as well as chestnut sweetness and lingering floral finish of a classic green. Sweet and mellow, with nutty tones, sugarsnap peas and soft, pleasantly dry finish.

...none of which matters if your brewing style doesn't deliver that cup for you. Tea is supposed to be a relaxing-but-energizing sensory experience, and if you have to stop and fret with timers and thermometers to enjoy it, then you're brewing the wrong tea. It sounds like the second cup is tasting more to you like the intended "best" cup, but whether you're willing to discard the first brewing to get to the second is entirely a matter of personal preference.

There's daily tea and there's ritual tea. One might go to greater lengths when the preparation of the cup is as big a part of the soothing ritual as drinking it, but that's not the equivalent of the $10 bottle of wine the local grocery store carries; it's the bottle special-ordered from Spec's for a birthday, and it had better be damn good to deserve that treatment. For daily tea, you want something that produces a cup you enjoy under the unique, personal circumstances you bring to casual preparation. For me, that involves waiting for the tea to cool considerably (which changes the flavor) and forgetting to remove the tea bag until the cup has been finished (which makes it very strong and bitter). When I added sugar, I'd take the bag out after a reasonably standard time to put the sugar in, and I cared less which tea I drank because it was all going to end up medium-strength and very sweet. When I stopped adding sugar, I settled on Twinings Earl Grey because it's the one that tastes best under my new daily brewing conditions, including not removing the bag. More expensive Earl Greys will just prompt me to add sugar again, because they aren't to my taste unless I brew them more meticulously. Tea is a ridiculously personal thing, between one's brewing habits and one's palate; altering one thing (like no longer taking honey) may necessitate finding an entirely new tea to suit. It's important to stand firm, though, on the idea that there is a tea that suits your brewing habits; be reluctant to change your brewing habits unless the tea is definitely worth it.

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

All that said, the Gyokuro (http://www.adagio.com/green/gyokuro.html) is an interesting special-case tea. It has an especially high L-theanine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine) content. The effect is like having a higher caffeine content, but instead of increasing the caffeine jitters, it has a calming effect along with its mood-boosting and cognition-improving qualities.

So. Japanese green tea. There's sencha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sencha), which is brewed tea from unground leaves, and matcha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matcha), which is powdered tea; both are made from Camellia sinensis leaves. There's kukicha, which is made from stems and twigs, rather than the leaves used for sencha/matcha. There are words for different grades of tea, different cultivars of Camellia sinensis, leaves harvested at different times, and for plants grown under different conditions. Gyokuro is one of the latter. It starts off as a standard tea plant, as for sencha/matcha/kukicha, but three weeks before harvest, the plants are shaded. The decreased sunlight causes the plant to change, creating higher concentrations of some substances. Among those are the L-theanine and chlorophyll. The Gyokuro leaves should be a more intense green than the other teas.

Chlorophyll is not water-soluble, and is flavorless, so this might not seem like it would be significant in tea made by steeping whole leaves in hot water. However, the heat of the water does break down proteins in the chloroplasts and those do make it into the tea; that's what gives green tea its green/yellow color. So if you overbrew the Gyokuro, or steep it in hotter water, you'll get more of that "chlorophyll taste", the bright, grassy flavor most people associate with chlorophyll. To my taste buds, gyokuro is just green tea turned up to eleven; to others, it comes across as brassy, acrid, bitter, or even sweeter, depending on how your particular palate reacts to all the things that go along with the extra chloroplasts. [I had a bit here about gyokuro matcha being the fairly standard tea in nice-ish Japanese restaurants, but you just discovered that for yourself. :) ]

Gyokuro is sensitive enough to heat that for gyokuro matcha, the grinding process must be done slowly to keep from heating the powder enough to start the breakdown of the chloroplasts. If the tea turns cloudy or brownish, it's definitely been brewed too hot; the brown comes from the chlorophyll itself breaking down into other substances from the heat. The fermentation process that turns Camellia sinensis leaves into black tea also degrades the chlorophyll and makes the tea brown. If you can't control the temperature of the water you brew with, this may be another one that treats you better on the second brewing. Gyokuro is not supposed to be bitter or astringent if made "properly", but "properly" requires a bit more commitment than the average tea.

In gyokuro matcha -- tea made by grinding the gyokuro leaves to a fine powder and drinking the powder as a suspension, rather than a strained decoction -- you end up consuming the leaves themselves, as well as the water, and your stomach acid works on the chlorophyll in the consumed tea leaves the way it does on any vegetable you eat. This is where a lot of the touted health benefits of green tea come from. You don't get as much from it when you discard the leaves instead of drinking them with the tea.

If your brewing conditions include having no control over the water temperature and a tendency to leave the leaves in the water for a long time, I may have to set you up with some matcha next. The heat would still be an issue, but the leaves aren't meant to be removed, so oversteeping is less of a problem. The matcha powder doesn't dissolve the way you would expect instant Lipton crystals to dissolve, though, because it's actual ground leaves, not dehydrated brewed tea. How do you feel about gritty tea? I did some really neat experiments a while back with adding flowers (jasmine, hibiscus) and fruits (cherries, apricots) to matcha powder...

I'm looking forward to your opinion of the Tai Lake Pi Lo Chun. I haven't tried it yet myself, but it's supposed to be an interesting smoky/fruity combination.

[ivy]

I don't expect that you'll like gyokuro, though I love it. (Do you like the grassy flavors?) I'm tempted to send you some of the Ontario Icewine stuff from New Mexico, though -- it's a great white, and you may enjoy that.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I'm lukewarm (hah!) about the gyokuro, but knowing that it's basically "sushi restaurant tea" means I feel less obligation to drink it like a purist, and have been putting a scant teaspoon of honey in... the stronger brew/finer chop has rendered it drinkable for three or four cups per batch of leaves (though the first pass does have strong notes of "freshly mowed lawn").

I will never say no to Ontario ice wines, though they are well into the "cloying" end of the taste spectrum. :-)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I have been informed that this is, in fact, a tea that tastes like OIW, and, as I do like white teas, this does have substantial appeal.

Brewed five cups from a single slightly heaping teaspoon of gyokuro today, with an increasingly lighter hand on the honey spoon, and it was just fine, incidentally.