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Essential Tea Secrets

Secrets of Time and Temperature Volume 2

Copyright © Tarot-n-Tea 2018

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Tea and Water Part 2: Time and Temperature

Doing Tea All Wrong

I was lazy. I couldn’t find my teaspoon and didn’t want to look for it. So, I grabbed tea with my hands (not recommended) and put it in the gaiwan. I filled my gaiwan and turned around to do some work and forgot about it. Typically, the brew time for gaiwan hovers around thirty seconds. It had been five minutes at least—maybe longer, I don’t know.

The amount of tea recommended is three grams, but mine was six to ten grams. And you know what? It ended up being the best cup of oolong I ever had, and I did it all wrong!

This taught me something very important about the tea ritual and what that perfect cup of tea is: there are no rules. There is only the place you start from. There is no goal other than a fulfilling relationship and ritual.

Everyone, it seems, is an expert about tea. These experts can whip up a chart about how much tea you use for the amount of water. What usually happens is someone copies from someone else and there is very little variation among sources.

What this means is someone else telling you how tea should taste and

how you should make it. This is an underlying principle in marketing: “we” are going to tell you what lifestyle is good for you—what it looks like, smells like, and tastes like. This is done for a very good reason: you do not have to think, and the company controls your experience and expression of their brand. If consumers have to think, the perception on our part is we have to “work,” and most of us don’t want to do that. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard the phrase: “Just tell me how to do it.”

When the consumer likes what you tell them, bam! You are a winner. If they don’t like it, it’s the company’s fault. The consumer is blameless. The company tries harder to make you see it their way. Eventually, you may come to see it their way, and they become the winner again. Marketing knows that to make you happy is not to ask you to work or to think and to give you the lifestyle transformation you paid for—or at least make you believe you got the lifestyle transformation.

What’s wrong here? For starters, you are giving yourself over to the “ideal” the company wants you to

believe in (even though it is often imaginary at best). The second problem is that you are allowing someone else to tell you what to value, how to behave, what to choose. Free will? What free will? Finally, there is little room for individuality, innovation, and creativity. This is a soul-sucking situation that reminds me of the scene in Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal, where where the Skesis drain the essence from the pod people to keep them young and the pod people become zombie slaves.

If you are into zombie marketing, more power to you. However, if you are into valuing individuality, valuing creativity, getting in touch with what you like and your core values, then you will need to think and experiment. Instructions, books, stories, and articles are only a place to begin, and that is all. I don’t care that there is an alphabet after the expert’s name, or they received their expert scrolls from a panel of the gods.

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Tea Description What You See Temperature

Shrimp eyes Tiny bubbles

135–145°F

Crab eyes Small bubbles

145–160°F

White tea, spring green teas, Japanese green tea

Fish eyes Medium-sized bubbles

160–170°F

Green tea

Fish eyes to a string of pearls

Larger (break the surface, cling to side)

170–185°F

Oolong tea

A string of pearls to dragon eyes

Extra-large bubbles (beginning to boil)

185–205°F

Black tea

Small dragon eyes

Soft, rolling boil

190–205°F

Puer Big dragon eyes

Hard, rolling boil

205–212°F

Unless we are talking about operating a nuclear power plant or flying a 747, no one is an expert in your life but you.

That being said, the Chinese have been drinking tea for over five thousand years. They have cultivated not only the plant but also the experience. When I began to study tea, I was shocked to discover all the wisdom that has been lost on the Westerner concerning tea. When I first began to learn and experience the Chinese way of tea, I finally got to experience firsthand how another culture, like the Asian culture, experiences a Westerner. I found that we became brutal in our treatment of tea; we dishonored the wisdom that had been cultivated for thousands of years in the way of tea. We wanted it bigger and faster; we conformed tea to us. In the process, we took the traditional tools that had been designed over the centuries to work with tea and made them into other things that “fixed” the tea, because in wanting bigger and faster tea, it made the tea bitter, stronger (not better), more astringent, and poorer in quality and nutrition.

The fair cup in the Chinese ritual became the creamer, and the gaiwan became the sugar bowl. Teapots became five hundred times bigger, and cups that started small have grown larger and larger, with some resembling Western soup bowls. We scaled our tea. We gulp tea. We don’t

Tea Amount

The general guideline for the amount of tea is around three grams per six to eight ounces. For gongfu style for a single person who will consume three to five “cups,” the recommendation remains the same. This is a great place to start but not a guideline to live by. The only way to know is to experiment. Higher quality of tea tends to require less amount of tea than store-bought brands.

And there is a considerable difference in the varieties of teas. Oolongs tend to require less tea while green and white may require more.

Water Temperature Guidelines

Free will, innovation, and crossing the line with water temperatures is all permitted, with some caution. Teas are individual as they are processed very differently from one kind to another. While your puer can tolerate the boiling water, many oolongs cannot. In fact, there are many kinds of tea that are vulnerable to scalding. There is nothing worse than a cup of oolong that has been hit with hard boiling water. Yuck!

Here are some industry guidelines to help you begin (see table to the right). The hotter the water, the more quickly it will steep the tea, and steeping time will need to be reduced. Hot water can release the tannins,

care where the water comes from, how it is heated, just as long as we can make our tea and move on. I was appalled when I realized this.

I began to understand why the tea ritual was designed like it is in Asia—it is a working together of the person and the tea, not domination or submission. It wasn’t about forcing something or trying to “get something out of it” for us. It is about flowing. It is a conversation. It is a cultivated relationship that takes time and attention.

Temperature Guidelines

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chlorophyll, and other compounds too quickly and can make the tea unnecessarily bitter or astringent. If the water is too hot, it can cloud the tea and reduce a complex tea down to a single note.

Never assume that your first cup of tea is all that the tea has to offer. I found that some high- grade oolongs are perfect at the shrimp-eye to the fish-eye range temperature range. Using hotter water, the taste is corrupted. It took mistakes, accidents, and a deliberate relationship with the tea to understand this. Aside from the relationship part, you will not hear mention about mistakes, accidents, or doing things wrong as a positive discovery in most tea books or websites. This is very sad and gives the wrong impression. Mistakes are the midwives to personal discovery and innovation. Steeping Time

Once again, steeping time is not universal. Not only does steeping time change based on the style you take your tea (Asian or Western), but also each of tea will require their own steeping time regardless of its classification. Not all green tea can be brewed the same because it is green tea. Within each classification are so many variations that respond individually to temperature and diffusion that to tell someone to just follow “this chart” is grossly erroneous and misleading. Below are just a few considerations to consider when steeping your tea:

Highly processed broken leaf

Usually referred to as fanning, your grocery-store pre-bagged tea is usually done steeping within a minute, unless you lower the temperature. Because so much of the surface is exposed to water, even at lower temperatures, diffusion occurs quickly.

Whole leaf, large leaf

I have heard it said that whole leaf takes longer to diffuse than bagged tea, often because less of the surface is exposed to the water. This may be true as a fact, but not a fact when making a determination for steeping time. There some are whole-leaf teas that are ready to drink in about a minute. It is the individual properties of the tea that dictate diffusion time and the room that is allowed for the tea to steep.

The tighter and more compact the tea is, the longer it will take to diffuse.

Oolongs

Every type of oolong will dictate to you its preferred diffusion timing. Rolled and twisted Oolong takes longer because of its tight shape that must unfurl. Experimentation is the only way to go.

High grades

There exist some high-grade whole-leaf teas that do not need a long diffusion time, some under a minute. For many higher-grade teas, the shorter the steep may be better.

Puer

There is a wide variety of puer and thus a variety of diffusion times. Like oolong, puer changes taste with the amount of time it is steeped, which is why it is preferred for the gongfu method of tea that promotes multiple steepings. Puer gets stronger the longer it is diffused and never gets bitter. If you use the Western style of tea, try altering the steeping times to cultivate the taste that appeals to you.

Whites White tea is the least processed and is often very delicate. Many varieties can be ruined with too-hot water and too-long steeping.

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Steeping More than Once

Many teas are tastier and more satisfying when brewed with less water and at shorter times. Typically, this is referred to as the gongfu method. If you do not prefer gongfu, try changing your teacup to a demitasse cup and a smaller teapot in the range of 300–500 ml. This adapted Asian method requires an electric kettle and a strainer (if there is none in the teapot). Add 2.5 g to 3.5g of tea to the tea pot. Add the appropriate temperature of water to the pot, filling the pot halfway to three-fourths of the way, depending on how big it is. You want enough water to fill one to two cups of tea. Diffusion time is twenty to thirty seconds. For some other teas, less or more time may be preferred.

Fill the cups of tea. When you are ready, reheat the water and refill the teapot to steep for another cup. Only loose whole-leaf tea does best with this method. You can re-steep most teas two to three times minimum this way. For some teas, subsequent steepings may require longer steeping times for preferred taste.

Washing Your Tea

This section should have come first as it is something to be done before drinking tea, but most Westerns have never heard of it. Most loose-leaf whole-leaf tea should be washed before drinking. It removes dust that accumulated during processing. Washing tea is also very helpful for tightly rolled or twisted teas in that it “wakes it up” and gets it ready for steeping.

Take hot water and pour it over the leaves to slightly above the surface. You can give the vessel a quick but gentle swirl and then pour off the water. You do not want to let the tea stand; water needs to be quickly poured off; you only want it to only rinse the leaves and not diffuse them.

When I first heard about washing tea early in my journey, I was skeptical. I then made a practice to about a month to taste test numerous teas. I washed them first and then critiqued subsequent steepings and compared this to the western way of taking tea. This method proved to be superior.

Please note: Do not wash highly processed tea. This will only leach much of the tea. Highly processed tea doesn’t need washing.

Too busy for this?

Changing our habits and perspective is no easy task especially for Westerners who tend to prefer to run on autopilot for day to day life. Change something or learning something new can often disturb our equilibrium even if that equilibrium isn’t good for us.

Rather than trying all these approaches every time you have tea, dedicate time each week to specifically concentrate on your tea ritual. You can also try adjusting or changing just one aspect at a time.

Cultivating a successful relationship with tea and creating a consistent ritual tea practice could very well provide you with insights for tackling other difficult life changes and goals. You just need to begin. You don’t have to be perfect nor do you have to do it every day.