[HN Gopher] Will boiling water ruin green tea?
___________________________________________________________________
Will boiling water ruin green tea?
Author : tmtvl
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-04-21 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.myjapanesegreentea.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.myjapanesegreentea.com)
| johnea wrote:
| HN DDoS'd...
| colordrops wrote:
| As I get older I notice my senses get less refined and weaker,
| especially smell and taste, and especially after a couple covid
| infections. This on top off constant distraction and stress makes
| it nearly impossible for me to taste any subtlety in things like
| coffee and tea and wine. To be frank I'm jealous of these people
| that can dedicate all this time and passion to various techniques
| and flavors.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| From experience, if it's not a passion or priority, it helps
| externalize the decision process. Have a friend (or online
| service) who does the research for you. Then you buy the
| minimum equipment (a temperature controlled kettle and a
| strainer) and a few teas. When you get time, brew them to the
| instructions. If you have some free time, you can start it with
| a cup of tea.
|
| There no need to get massively invested.
|
| This is how I learned to paint minis. All I did was buy some
| unpainted ones and drop by a friend's place. He has all of the
| supplies and equipment. All of my unpainted minis are in his
| closet. :)
|
| Edit: By having a friend, I mean if you have a friend who is
| into tea/coffee/wine/etc. I enjoy hanging out with people who
| have hobbies I wouldn't pick up on my own.
| andix wrote:
| It will make it taste bad (bitter). It's similar to overcooked
| pasta. Not ruined, but not good either.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| All teas have "optimal" temperatures and brew times. A lot of
| green teas do not work well being boiled into bitter
| disappointment. Before I had to give up caffeine, I recall
| Gunpowder green tea being less tricky to get right. :)
| fatfingerd wrote:
| I don't think their analysis about caffeine is correct and
| doesn't cite sources. I've seen a lower temperature for a longer
| time more often being ideal for maximizing caffeine vs other
| components in pubmed research on teas, I.e.:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21339166/
|
| If one does a lower temperature for a longer time it is often
| also equivalent to boiling for a very short time a.f.a pathogens.
| I think the relative bitterness is probably higher for higher
| temperature brews after normalizing on caffeine.
| cinbun8 wrote:
| I sorta knew this from experience, that high temperature would
| make the tea bitter. But why is this on HN?
| triyambakam wrote:
| Wouldn't you have this reaction to at minimum 50% of all HN
| submissions?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Because coders drink tea?
| politelemon wrote:
| Coders like <T>
| pacaro wrote:
| Except for the Marxist coders who only drink herbal infusions
|
| Because proper tea is theft
| mudita wrote:
| Are you familiar with the Hacker News Guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)?
|
| "What to Submit
|
| On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
| That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
| reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
| gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
| sva_ wrote:
| Sadly, boiling water will absolutely ruin matcha. But I'm too
| hooked.
| drooopy wrote:
| I can confirm. Matcha tastes like crap when made with boiling
| water.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| If you like it so much, it's probably worth buying a kettle
| with temperature control.
| sva_ wrote:
| Oh I don't need it, I have an eye for it.
|
| I meant that the matcha powder probably has pollutants which
| might get decreased by boiling it, as the article suggests,
| but that would ruin the flavor.
| taraparo wrote:
| the german tea expert Ernst Janssen recommends to also use
| boiling water to prepare green tea as most of the teas are
| contaminated with germs and other things. different green tea
| brands including organic tea brands were tested by the renowned
| German test.de magazine and they confirmed that, also most of
| organic teas are contaminated. and since this is nothing you can
| easily check at home, better use boiling water.
|
| https://www.ernst-janssen.com/tee-almanach
| https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Stiftung-Warentest-bewertet-gru...
| zokier wrote:
| That seems paranoid considering that I have never heard anyone
| getting food poisoning from tea, no matter how it was brewed.
|
| edit: Reading the linked article, it seems mostly concerned
| about contaminants and not germs. Intuitively thinking, I'd
| imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from
| leaves to the drink than lower temps?
| taraparo wrote:
| > I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of
| those from leaves to the drink than lower temps?
|
| that is actually an interesting aspect.
| StrangeATractor wrote:
| Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to
| worry about.
|
| As for boiling tea for sanitation, I took a wilderness first
| responder class and they taught us that you could bring water
| to a boil at any altitude a human can breath at (without
| holding it at a boil for 15 minutes as some claim) and it's
| considered sterilized. In Cusco, that would be around
| 191F/89C (humans can breathe quite a bit higher up than
| Cusco). Not a bad tea-brewing temp!
|
| Also, I suggest trying kukicha. It's high in l-theanine and
| lower in caffeine. Tasty too.
| nijave wrote:
| I think it's a halflife/timing thing. Once it hits boiling,
| it's instance death for most microbials.
|
| You can keep it a lot lower for longer but it's also
| potentially difficult to tell the temperature (easier to
| say, bubbles? It's hot enough)
| brianwawok wrote:
| > Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to
| worry about.
|
| How about the people touching / sneezing on it in the
| packaging factory?
| elif wrote:
| If you source your green tea from a Japanese tea farm,
| this is really not a concern. Farm workers all wear
| gloves and masks, and the tea leaves are harvested
| directly from the tea bushes to a net via a machine.
|
| Additionally, the tea plants are covered by cloth for up
| to a month before harvest, dramatically reducing the
| chances of bird droppings.
|
| They are also steamed, rolled, and dried by mechanical
| devices which remove virtually all moisture.
| nijave wrote:
| Not sure about most things transferred via touch/sneeze
| but I imagine lack of moisture would cause anything
| living to die fairly quickly.
| morsch wrote:
| The germ thing seems to go back to this 2005 press release by
| the BfR, which does indeed urge people to use boiling water
| to kill Salmonella particularly when preparing herbal tea. It
| doesn't cite any known cases or numbers: https://mobil.bfr.bu
| nd.de/de/presse/presseinformationen/2005...
|
| Searching further, there were a couple of cases of Salmonella
| in infants in 2003 that were traced to fennel anise tea. The
| timing fits. I couldn't find anything more recent, but I
| didn't look very hard.
|
| https://www.ernaehrungs-
| umschau.de/news/16-07-2003-salmonell...
|
| Here's more data from government sources. They tested tea and
| herbal tea in 2008, and found traces of Salmonella or E.coli
| in 2-3% of prosecute products, and mold in 20%. Doesn't
| differentiate between herbal and real tea.
|
| https://www.lgl.bayern.de/lebensmittel/warengruppen/wc_47_te.
| ..
|
| I'm not worried. But then I usually use boiling water, or
| almost boiling water, which should be enough to kill micro
| organisms. And I'm sure I get more mold toxins from various
| other food sources without noticing it, cereals, nuts,
| processed foods etc. Tea is a dilution, after all.
| stametseater wrote:
| All foodstuffs are contaminated with germs, unless you go to
| extraordinary effort to prevent it (e.g. intense gamma
| radiation.) Unless there is some particular reason to care
| (you're a hospital feeding people who had their bone marrow
| nuked by cancer/chemo), then the correct solution is to stop
| caring. Who ever heard of people dropping dead because they
| brewed their tea with sub-boiling water? This isn't happening,
| it's not something you should worry about.
| Vecr wrote:
| Do they really use gamma, or just electron beams like in a TV
| tube?
| thfuran wrote:
| People mostly get by fine without boiling their salads but
| they do occasionally get e coli or something.
| taraparo wrote:
| they even found salmonella in tea. to kill them one would
| need to heat the tea constantly above 70 degree Celsius over
| a period of ten minutes.
| punnerud wrote:
| 71degC for 1/2min to kill salmonella, instantly with 74.
|
| 10min is around 64degC.
|
| Remember that the cup often cool down the water 10-15
| degrees. So the water should not be under 90degC from the
| boiler to be safe.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Dreck reinigt den Magen. Stellt Euch nicht so an, Ihr
| Weicheier!
| prophesi wrote:
| There's a lot of factors to it. The way the leaves are processed,
| the quality/freshness of the leaves, ratio of leaf to water,
| steeping time.
|
| I think in general it's safest to brew green teas at 175f. But
| I'm doing quick gongfu brewing sessions with a late-march sichuan
| green tea, and it tastes great at 205f. Less intense at the usual
| 175f, but picks up more subtle flavors.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I appreciate the connoisseur vernacular
| prophesi wrote:
| Becoming a tea snob helped me stay away from alcohol during
| quarantine :/
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Becoming a whiskey snob just made me wish I could abide
| cigar smoking.
| tmtvl wrote:
| TL;DR no, but it will make it bitter and astringent because more
| caffeine and catechins will be extracted.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| It depends on the green, though. Good-quality green tea from
| China can often withstand higher temperatures or long brewing,
| to the point where it's normal to just pinch some tea in a mug
| and refill with hot water throughout the day.
| archagon wrote:
| IIRC, Chinese green tea is a completely different beast from
| Japanese green tea like sencha.
| zokier wrote:
| I wouldn't say it is matter of quality; or rather lot of
| high-quality teas can still be quite sensitive to high temps.
| Gyokuros mentioned in the article are good example
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Please re-read my post that I said _from China_
| specifically. Gyokuro, a green tea primarily of japanese
| make and style, does not apply to what I said. I 'm
| thinking of gan lu or mao jian style teas.
| dima55 wrote:
| The article this thread is commenting on is about
| Japanese green tea, hence the confusion.
| olivermarks wrote:
| I drink ridiculous amounts of English Breakfast tea with 1% milk
| every day. The water HAS to be boiling when it hits the tea. You
| cn really tell the difference if the water is less than boiling.
| Same but more subtle with green tea imo
| dima55 wrote:
| Do you actually drink not-bottom-of-the-barrel sencha? If not,
| your experience is not applicable, respectfully. With even
| middle-of-the-road sencha the difference is far from subtle.
| olivermarks wrote:
| I always thought Sencha was different to green tea, steamed
| leaves, more subtle?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| 15% of people don't taste bitterness in the same way. Hops
| taste floral and a bit sweet to me and I like to chew on
| Artemisia species my family finds hideously bitter. I could
| put cheap gunpowder green tea in a percolator for an hour and
| it wouldn't taste bitter to me. Perhaps the gp has the same
| trait?
| Avshalom wrote:
| I took the simple precaution of moving a mile above sea level.
| calebm wrote:
| Yes. I've tried it - makes it obviously more bitter.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-21 23:00 UTC)