There are thousands of guides to brewing tea and I’m certainly no expert. In fact, just as soon as I “mastered” the art of brewing my own coffee at home (from beans to grinding to four different brewing methods) did I get out of the coffee business and move on to tea. My trip to India really got me stoked on tea and I quickly rushed to master it. Currently, I’m using only one brewing method which many consider the best for the delicate tea brewing process. Tea can turn bitter quickly and many teas can only be brewed once or you can continue to add water. Bagged tea is fine but it’s better to graduate to the next step which is loose leaf and that’s what I’ll focus on today.
Let’s first review what I’ve purchased so far
- Finum Brewing Basket (large)
- Finum Brewing Basket (medium)
- Bodum Assam 4-Cup Tea Press Teapot
- Medelco 1-WK112-BL-4 12-Cup Glass Stovetop Whistling Kettle
- Trudeau Stainless Steel Airtight Canister
Here are a few of the teas that are in my sealable containers:
- Feng Huang Dan Cong (The Phoenix Bird of Guandong) ($8.20 for 2 ounces)
- Darjeeling First Flush Thurbo ($11.50 for 2 ounces)
- Moli Hua Cha – QUE SHE JIAN – Jasmine Tea – Little Bird Tongue ($7 for 2 ounces)
- MASALA SPICE (fine Indian spices with black tea) ($9.25)
The Masala Spice is used for making “Masala Chai Tea” You can make this spice yourself and most Indian families have their own recipe although very few have any variance between each other. Just Google it to save some money but there’s an emphasis on fresh spices so your local India food store will have what you need and better quality than the grocery.
I’m not an expert on teas. However, I’ve fallen in love with the Darjeeling Black tea. It’s a standard tea with an exceptional history and pricy compared to most black teas. It’s absolutely worth the extra price. Oolong tea has another history and style of brewing and Chai tea is another beast altogether. You’ll notice that all of my teas listed are from the same place. I had to find an alternative to buying teas direct from India (a middleman actually) since I’m not buying in bulk and the tea I brought back from India has already ran out (*sad face*).
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- Brewing tea is quite simple. Let’s review my morning brewing ritual:
- Bring 2 cups of water to a boil
- Put 2-3 small pinches of Darjeeling tea in my medium basket and place that in my favorite large coffee cup
- These small pinches should cover the bottom of the basket but not too high. Just enough to completely cover the bottom maybe 5 millimeters high
- Bring the water to a boil and immediately remove from burner and fill the cup high
- Brew this for 3-4 minutes
- Add half an ounce of cream and one pack of sugar (english style)
- Enjoy!
With my kind of Darjeeling, you can get a little more flavor out of that serving so, I keep a little water in the kettle for adding to that cup later. It’s easy and I keep one basket at work and use our commercial coffee makers at the office that have a hot water dispenser and that works perfectly!
If you brew the Darjeeling too long, not much happens. Eventually, it will stop releasing any flavor at all so it’s just becoming a waste of time as the water temperature continues to drop and room temperature tea is never fun.
At home, I brew Oolong tea as you usually make an entire pot of it and it is expected to last for a while. Oolong tea can be made in a few different ways. Most proper tea shops will bring the tea to you already in an empty clay cup and the oolong tea will be steaming and moist from a wetting procedure that makes the tea “bloom” then you add water from a clay pot to that glass and brew for 30 seconds and drink. This method means you have 10-20 small cups of tea from one ounce of oolong. I prefer another and more tricky method.
I put quite a bit of oolong into my Bodum Tea kettle and wet it with hot water and wait 30 seconds. This will usually involve a large quantity of the tea which can become costly (which is why I only make this pricey $4 an ounce tea on the weekends). I then pour nearly boiling water into the kettle to make about 3 cups of tea and I brew this for no more than a few minutes. If you exceed 5 minutes, the Oolong begins to put out a bitter taste that ruins the entire pot. You should not let it sit. Letting it sit won’t just make the water cold, it’ll ruin the tea!
I then will put an ounce of cream into the entire pot with a teaspoon of honey. I stir and drink my 3 cups over the course of 20 minutes. I can keep the kettle on my warming platter if it’s going to be longer. However, don’t let the tea sit there for hours even if the leaves have been removed. You’ll have a nasty tea at that point just as you would if you let coffee sit for a while. It just looses freshness.
The Masala Chai is still sitting in the bag. I haven’t explored that yet so I can’t provide any insight. Of note, I didn’t read any guides for this. It’s just my 3 months since returning from India have been spent brewing tea twice in the morning and nearly all weekend. The only times I’ve made coffee at home is when having guests over. I’ve had a lot of trial and error and maybe didn’t produce a drinkable cup of tea for the first two weeks of trying.
I was going to write a section on Loose Leaf versus Tea Bags for my at home tea drinking. However, About.com pretty much covered it so I’ve plagiarised them (while still linking to them).
Loose-Leaf Tea vs. Teabags
Loose-leaf tea is tea that is not brewed in a teabag. When you steep loose-leaf tea, it has (or should have) room for tealeaves to absorb water and expand as they infuse. This allows the water to flow through the leaves and extract a wide range of vitamins, minerals, flavors and aromas from the leaves.When you steep tea in a teabag, its infusion is limited by the size of the teabag. Packing full-leaf tea into a small teabag won’t yield a very flavorful cup. For many years, the teabag industry adapted tea to the teabag. By filling teabags with smaller particles of tea (rather than whole leaves), the surface area and infusion rate of the tea were increased. A more flavorful (though not particularly nuanced) brew resulted. It was cheap, easy and good enough for your average “milk and sugar” tea drinker, so it was successful.
More recently, some tea merchants have decided to adapt the teabag to the tea. Instead of using flat-tasting grades of tea (tiny, broken leaves known as “dust” and “fannings”), they are opting for higher grades of tea with more sophisticated flavor profiles and aromas. They are getting better brews from these leaves than they would with traditional teabags by putting them into plus-size teabags, “tea pouches” and “tea socks,” as well as “pyramid bags” (pyramid-shaped teabags). All of these teabag variations allow the leaves to expand more than traditional teabags, thus creating a better brew.
Standardization vs. Variety
Despite these innovations in teabags, many tea connoisseurs still snub them for two main reasons. The first has to do with adherence to tradition and the enjoyment of tea rituals that do not include teabags. The second has to do with a more seasonal, artisanal, foodie approach to tea.Typically, teabags are blended for standardization. Year to year, a particular grocery store tea will taste the same. This is because it’s blended with teas from around the world. Each year the quantities of teas from each location vary based on price and the final flavor profile the blenders are trying to attain. Often, a higher premium is placed on a tea’s price and standardization than on its quality and character of flavor profile.
Loose-leaf tea is frequently the opposite. Loose-leaf tea may be specialty tea from a single region or even a single portion of a single estate. Its flavor profile, aroma and appearance vary from year to year and season to season. Generally, estates, regions, processing styles and growing seasons are known for particular flavors and aromas, but there is a far larger range of flavors and aromas available from loose-leaf tea than there is from standardized blends. This breadth and depth of tea profiles appeals to foodies (people who are very interested in food flavors and politics) as well as other obsessive types (as evidenced by the recent trend of tech stars turning to tea).
Maybe, I’m in that last category of people mentioned as “tech stars” who are turning to tea but it’s not really about that. Either way, this is a tech blog so maybe I shouldn’t try to defend myself too much.
Anyway, that’s my tea guide. Thanks for reading and to @behindtheview for the inspiration.