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Will boiling water ruin green tea?

myjapanesegreentea.com

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Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#201

Post by masklinn »

amluto wrote: post #194
masklinn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#202

Post by pwpw »

todd8 wrote: post #168
gpvos wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200F = 93.3C, 190F = 87.8C. Really, we're talking about boiling, why would one even consider using Fahrenheit?

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…

Once you know 100 is boiling, a simple rhyme helps to remember Celsius for common weather temperatures:

30 is hot.

20 is pleasing.

10 is cold.

And 0 is freezing.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#203

Post by yonaguska »

elif wrote: post #49
brianwawok wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about. How about the people touching / sneezing on it in the packaging factory?

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 rem…

Just a shout out to ikkyu tea, if you buy in bulk and get free shipping, it's a pretty good value for tea that you can trust.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#204

Post by bradhe »

taraparo wrote: post #8

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. h…

This is an extremely German world view.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#205

Post by inimino »

coffeeling wrote: post #184
rsfern wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, …)

Definitely not. Say, 86F to C. 86F is 30C, but dividing the F by 2 would give you "43C", which converts to 109F. That is not a trivial difference.

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).

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#206

Post by BobaFloutist »

nijave wrote: post #36
StrangeATractor wrote: post #21

Earlier 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)

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.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#207

Post by masklinn »

hinkley wrote: post #200
masklinn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You know it’s the same plant right?

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.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#208

Post by mock-possum »

gpvos wrote: post #128
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It isn't like it is difficult to convert.

No, it is very hard to convert. The US has about 4% of the world population. Adapt. It's not worth the communication problems.

Dude we all have robot calculators in our pockets - it’s the work of seconds to convert with zero thought on the user’s part:

“Hey Siri convert 190°F to Celsius.”

“190°F is 87.77 degrees Celsius.”

Boom. It is not very hard to convert.

Re: Will boiling water ruin green tea?

#210

Post by yencabulator »

kimmk wrote: post #169
rplst8 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conside…

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 d…

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.

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