Guidelines for Good Tea-Making
Guidelines for Good Tea-Making
Below are my guidelines for great tea-making! Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you have to follow these rules or you'll never enjoy a good cup of tea ever again because you're some sinful heretic who broke all my rules. These are just the rules that work best for me and my tastes. Plus, it's VERY important that you know and understand the guidelines I follow in making my tea, because the way I make my tea affects how they taste, and therefore, it will also affect the reviews I write for each tea, which is the whole point of this site to begin with. Anyway, here they are!
Ganymede's Guidelines for Good Tea-Making
1. Always start with spring water or distilled water (ideally spring), and make sure it's fresh and cool. Brita-filtered water isn't bad either, unless the water you put through the filter to begin with is so bad that it's cloudy and reeks of chlorine and metals. If you absolutely must use tap water (and admittedly, the tap water is quite good in a few areas), it is all the more important that the water is cold, as hot tap water can carry sediments from the tap along with it (YUMMY!).
2. Bring the water to a full, rolling boil in a stainless steel kettle, and then remove the kettle from heat immediately, as water that is allowed to boil too long loses the oxygen gas dissolved in it and can cause your tea to taste rather blah and flat. In fact, this is another reason why you'd want to start with cold water instead of hot, as cold water has the ability to hold more oxygen gas than hot water.
3. When using loose tea (which you should do, when possible, in place of bagged tea), measure about one heaping teaspoon of loose tea for each teacup of water (about six ounces) and place it into the teapot. A good rule of thumb is to use "one teaspoon of tea for each person and an extra one for the teapot," but you can tweak this depending on your tastes. When I'm not in the mood to go to all the trouble of loose tea and teapot, I use bagged tea, or I might sometimes put a good teaspoon of loose tea into a little handheld tea strainer (think of a little ball of wire mesh that opens and shuts when you squeeze the handle) - which I bought at a Barnes and Noble café, of all places - and stick that in the mug; I sometimes even just put the loose tea into a mug and let the bits settle to the bottom before I drink - either that or I might put a fine strainer over another mug and pour the tea into it from the first mug before drinking.
4. When you pour the water over your loose or bagged tea in a teapot or a mug, make sure the pot/mug is preheated. Pouring hot water into a cold pot/mug drastically lowers the water's temperature in the first few seconds and could affect the predictability of the steeping time for your tea as well as the quality of the flavors that get steeped out. This isn't a big deal with some teas, especially ones like mint or oolong or chamomile that you could steep forever and ever without harming the taste (in fact, it improves them!), but the flavor of a tea that needs to be steeped *just right* (like green tea) could be seriously compromised. The easiest way to preheat the pot/mug is to pour a bit of your heated water into the pot/mug and rinse it on all sides, discarding the water once you're done. THEN you can put in your tea, and finally, the water.
5. When trying a new tea for the first time, take little sips at various intervals - three minutes after steeping, five minutes, ten minutes, et cetera. This way you can determine exactly when the tea has been steeped to the strength and intensity that you like. My general rule is that for weaker herbal teas like mint and chamomile, I like to steep the tea indefinitely, leaving the loose tea or the teabags in the water till I finish it all up. In contrast, I only steep dark, strong teas like Earl Grey and the common black tea (both of which I don't drink often) for only two minutes max, even though many people like to steep them much longer. I find that light herbal teas need long steeping to bring out the full intensity of the flavors and fragrances and dimensions, while strong, dark teas do better with short steeping times that allow you to taste the subtleties of the tea as opposed to long steeping times that turn them into bitter, dark, tasteless puddles of sludge. (Yet there are exceptions: oolong and houji are strong, dark teas, but I actually like to steep them for long periods of time because doing so brings out the full, mellow flavor of the teas without making them bitter or gross.) As for green tea and genmai tea, I drink them so often that I can tell just by smell and color when they're ready - usually just three to five minutes max. Further steeping makes green tea and genmai tea unpalatably bitter, though genmai tea can handle longer steepings better than green tea, and at any rate I sometimes like having my green tea a bit oversteeped. Keep in mind that these rules for steeping times are just the general guidelines that I follow; it may be that you prefer long steeping times for Earl Grey and short ones for oolong (heresy, I say!), but it's just that these are the guidelines that work best for me and my tastes.
5a. It is very important to note that if the tea you're making has WHOLE tea leaves in it as opposed to tea leaves that have been CUT, the steeping times will vary. Cut leaves release their essences more quickly and completely than do whole leaves, and therefore require much shorter steeping times than teas that use whole leaves (it is much easier to oversteep cut leaves and get a bitter-tasting tea than it is to do the same with whole leaves). Not surprisingly, water temperature should be higher when one pours the water over whole leaves than when one pours them over cut leaves, as the higher temperature will facilitate a quicker release of the essences from the whole leaves. For instance, one brand of genmai tea I use has whole tea leaves in it, and when I make this tea I pour the water over the loose tea a few seconds after I take the kettle off the heat. The other brand of genmai tea that I use has CUT leaves in it, and when I make genmai with this brand I let the kettle sit for a minute or two after I take it off the heat before I pour it over the leaves (I also steep this tea for a shorter amount of time than I do with the first brand).
6. When making iced tea, you should use more tea in proportion to the water to make it stronger (it's important that you don't necessarily steep the tea longer to make it stronger, which could increase the bitterness in some teas - just use more tea in the water instead), since it's harder to detect the fragrances and flavors of many teas when they're cold and not steaming with warm vapor. Make the tea at double strength if you're going to pour it over ice cubes of plain water; alternatively, if you freeze some tea in ice cube trays in advance, you can use those cubes instead when you're having your iced tea and you wouldn't have to increase the strength of the tea so much. Of course, only Martha Stewart has enough time and slaves to be able to exercise such foresight these days.
7. Never put cream or milk into your tea. In my opinion, it ruins the taste by masking the flavors of the tea itself, basically taking away the whole point of drinking the tea in the first place. When I drink tea I want to be able to taste the essences of the plant items that went into making it, and having a "warm milk" aspect in the flavor of one's tea isn't really pleasing. Cream and milk not only muddies the clarity of the tea water; it muddies the taste as well. Although some people would debate me on this opinion when it comes to teas like "Lipton orange pekoe" or Earl Grey, I'm sure most would agree that putting cream in teas like green tea or genmai or jasmine tea is tantamount to sacrilege. My one exception to my no-cream/no-milk rule is the Thai iced tea, which basically consists of a very flavorful blend of black teas and spices (sort of like chai, but without the bite of bergamot) that's been spiked with lots of evaporated milk and sugar and poured over ice - as one book says, it's the best adult milkshake one could ever have.
8. When using sweeteners in tea (and please don't use them in teas like green tea or genmai!), use unrefined sugar, like the Sugar in the Raw brand. I find that white and brown sugars lack the subtleties of unrefined sugar, which goes especially well with herbal teas and mint tea in particular. Also, sometimes the right honey can compliment a tea well, provided you don't overdo it. And never, ever use maple syrup in your tea - unless it's one hundred percent pure (and not that fake amber sludge) and you have an urge to experiment! I rarely, if ever, use sweeteners in tea, but sometimes I can't resist putting unrefined sugar in mint tea or oolong, or orange blossom honey in rose hip tea, as the flavors just go together so well. Also, if you like lemon as much as I do, many teas will taste great with a spritz of freshly squeezed lemon juice, especially lighter teas like herbals; dark/mellow teas like oolong or houji are better by themselves.
9. Don't buy too much tea at once. Bagged teas, especially those that are individually foil-wrapped, can last a good while, but keep loose teas in dry, airtight containers and buy them in small amounts so you use them up fairly quickly. (This is a rule that I am terrible at following, and with teas that get old I sometimes end up gritting my teeth and drinking them anyway - even if the tea might not taste as good - because I hate to waste it. If it's green tea or genmai tea and it's gotten so old that it doesn't just taste slightly off anymore, I steep it and wash my face and body with the infusion. Whatever solution I resort to, though, I hate having tea go bad in the first place, and it's a habit that I'm trying to break. So don't be like me, kids - learn from my mistakes and all that other parental jazz!)
10. Use your common sense and ignore my rules when required; sometimes we don't have the time to worry about all this detail when making tea. For instance, when I'm at work, I just plop a bag or two of tea into my coffee cup, pour in some scalding hot water from the hot water dispenser at the water cooler, and let it sit somewhere to steep (I usually end up drinking a good two to four cups of tea during an eight-hour workday). Since I get distracted and/or busy at work and don't have time to sit around checking the steeping time of my tea, I almost always use bagged teas (though I've been known to use loose tea on occasion) and teas that can withstand and/or are enhanced by long periods of unsupervised steeping, such as mint tea, and especially oolong tea and houji tea. Such teas are practically foolproof, and taste great even though I pay almost no attention to detail when I hurriedly make them at work.