Making Good Tea
(também publicado no Substack)
It’s already Autumn, and a cup of tea is the perfect companion for reading a book while it rains outside. To prepare a good cup of tea, you first need quality tea leaves. When you order a special tea from overseas, you are essentially asking for a treasure. To prepare those leaves, you just need good water and a nice teapot. Your tea is well-infused when you extract the best flavours from it. However, using the wrong water or mishandling its temperature can ruin the experience.
Tea leaves are truly
an unpolished gem. You have a fantastic raw material right in front of you!
They were likely selected by local experts and travelled halfway around the
world before reaching your hands. It would be a pity to ruin them, wouldn’t you
agree?
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The famous Cutty Sark was a tea clipper, one of the fastest ships of its time (1869).
Fortunately, it is
not that difficult to bring out the best flavours in your tea. Here are five
elements that will improve your teatime:
1) Cleaning.
Wash your teaware before using it, keeping in mind that chemicals are the enemy
of good taste. Don’t just throw your teapot into the dishwasher with harsh
detergents; instead, simply rinse it with boiling water. Old tea stains are not
dirty — they are just signs of an acquired patina.
2) Bottled water. Tea is made by infusing tea leaves
in water, and mineral water is the best choice for this. Tap water usually
contains excessive chlorine and other chemicals that will overpower the
delicate aromas of your leaves.
In the Chinese book “茶经
– The Classic of Tea” (762 CE), Lu Yu (陸羽) wrote 山水上，江水中，井水下, meaning that the best water comes from the mountain,
the second best from the river, and the least desirable from the well. The idea
is to bring pure nature to your cup. Any neutral-pH spring water will do
nicely.
3) Temperature. Generally, use 60 to 70 degrees
Celsius for green teas, 70 to 80 for oolong teas, and 80 to 95 for black teas.
If you don’t have a thermometer, you can bring the water just to a boil (100
degrees Celsius) and wait, as water cools by about 10 degrees Celsius per
minute. To put it simply, the main difference between these teas is oxidation:
green tea is not oxidized when dried, black tea is fully oxidized before
drying, and oolong leaves are partly oxidized. Oxidation plays a large role in
their flavour profiles. Green tea leaves are particularly delicate, and higher
temperatures can extract some unpleasant notes from them.
And then: to boil,
or not to boil — that is the question. In Japan, people boil water in a metal
pot called a chagama (茶釜) or in a cast-iron teapot. If you
are collecting spring water directly from nature, it is certainly wise to boil
it to protect yourself from bacteria. Another part of the Japanese traditional aesthetic
is enjoying the sound of boiling water crackling in the iron, which evokes the
gentle sound of a river streaming over rocks. However, unless you want to hear
the water boil, it makes little sense to boil bottled water. Doing so only
removes oxygen, making the water too flat.
4) Time. Generally, 2 to 3 minutes of
infusion is enough, though it ultimately comes down to personal taste. Steep it
longer if you like a deeper colour and more bitterness, or for less time if you
prefer delicate aromas and a lighter extraction. If you are not in a rush and
your water temperature is lower than suggested above, you can compensate by adding
another pinch of tea leaves and steeping them a little longer.
5) Ambience. You have just made a superb cup of
tea. Now, good company is welcome — whether that is a loved one, a book, a
film, or the landscape outside your window. Just sit comfortably, take a sip,
and enjoy the beauty around you.
After all this talk,
I am going to prepare a cup of tea for myself. Cheers!
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| That's my cup of tea. |
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You may like to read my other articles about tea:
Travelling with tea – part 1 (Portugal, Qatar, Bangladesh)
Travelling with tea – part 2 (China: Yunnan, Zhejiang, Fujian)
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