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.
Will boiling water ruin green tea?
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Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#92There'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.
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 drinkin…
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Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think it's a halflife/timing thing. Once it hits boiling, it's instance death for most microbials. You can keep it a lot lower for longer but it's also potentially difficult to tell the temperature (easier to say, bubbles? It's hot enough)
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.
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#95I 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.
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.
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#96There'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…
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.
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#97I 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
English teas are very much bred and selected for boiling water - this is definitely the right choice for them. For most greens though (particularly the more fragile ones), oh heck no. They taste absolutely awful at high temperatures.
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.
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
People mostly get by fine without boiling their salads but they do occasionally get e coli or something.
They occasionally get hepatitis or something and die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-Chi%27s 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.
They still exist in my country! (Belgium)
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ;)