Tea is astringent – the leaves are full of stuff that falls on the bitter side of the taste spectrum: A cup of tea contains caffeine, a bitter alkaloid, just one of the many bitter flavoring agents found in tea leaves. There are also bitter amino acids and chlorophyll along with astringent oxidation compounds like glutamic acid. All in all, brewed tea leans heavily towards pucker-inducing flavors.
Even with all those flavor components, it is too easy to enhance those bitter flavors by pouring boiling water over leaves and/or over-steeping. Most tea should be steeped between at low temperatures. The type of tea also plays a factor – white teas and green teas need even less heat than Oolongs and blacks. My fancy pants tea book tells me to brew between 160 and 200 degrees, the knowledgeable Tao of Tea recommends lower temps. Since I believe the number one problem facing the home cook is blasting foods with high heat, I would caution to steep at a lower temp, you can always add very hot water into the brewed tea to heat it to a desirable temp.
And for those who work only with a safety net…when using whole tea leaves, before firing up the kettle, pour 1-2 tablespoons of room temperature water over the leaves to ‘bloom’ the tea. This helps hydrate the leaves and insulates the tea if the water comes in too hot, keeping the steeping temperature an important 5 degrees lower.
Once the water temp is tamed, steeping times are the next important variable to conquer. 2 ½ minutes to 6 minutes depending on the tea, is not much of a guideline. Our friends at Portland’s Tao of Tea have some pretty good rules of thumb for brewing a better tea. They like the lower water temperature, which I whole-heartedly endorse: A thermometer really helps out with the correct temp, a step most brewers, even the novice brewers who need it the most will skip, so it is better to be a little under than over.
A bonus issue – tea bags contain the shake of the Camellia sinensis harvest, all the stuff that couldn’t get sold as premium – twigs, small leaves, broken leaves it all gets bagged up. Extra surface area coming in contact with hot, possibly too hot water, does give all those bitter compounds a chance to be released into the brew.
I believe I will finish up my tea-cycle of posts next week with the teas of Vietnam. However, I might detour again and write about Kombucha, a word my dictionary defines literally as ‘tea-sponge’. Dirty hippies, fermentation, fungal cultures…I am surprised there isn’t an epidemic of botulism. Added to the mysteries of Kombucha is the Myth of Detoxing the body – BTW why do all these folks worry more about detoxing and not the toxing they are doing in the first place?
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