Recipe Tea: What are you steeping these days?

cynthetiq · Jan 19, 2012

I haven't done any gaiwan brewing but last week's tea tasting got me more interested in trying it.

What’s grandpa style?

Grandpa style is a term that I coined a few years ago while talking about drinking tea casually, and it has since caught on, it seems, in the blogosphere for tea. In a nutshell, grandpa style means the brewing of tea in a large cup, with no filters or teaballs or bags or anything else in it, with water constantly refilled without much regard for infusion time or temperature. The only three things necessary for grandpa style brewing are tea leaves, water, and cup, preferably a large one. I named this grandpa style, because this is how my grandfather drinks his tea, and is one of the first memory I have of people drinking tea.
This is really the way that most Chinese drink their tea, most of the time, in most places. Relatively few people actually know how to brew tea gongfu style, much less practice it on a daily basis. Most just throw in some leaves every morning/afternoon/evening, pour hot water into their cup/thermos, and drink. The key to grandpa style is that you use a relatively low amount of tea leaves, pour hot water in, and refill water from time to time. I have given pointers as to skills to successful grandpa brewing. It is by far the most convenient way to drink tea in the office, or on the go. It is also a great way to finish up a tea that you no longer feel is worth your time to gongfu brew any longer.
One of the most important thing to note when drinking tea in general is that there’s really no reason why everything has to be tasted with gongfu style. Some teas are remarkably good with grandpa brewing, such as aged or roasted oolongs, or even cooked puerh of various sorts. It always takes some practice to get it right, but it actually can give you nuances in a tea that you don’t notice if you gongfu brew them. In that sense, it’s not inferior at all as a method of tea drinking – just different.
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This method is pretty simple. I will have to figure out which ones work this way, it's good for being lazy.

cynthetiq · Jan 25, 2012

after sampling some teas prepared gong fu cha, I want a gaiwan set like this one:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hengfu-Whit...ltDomain_0&hash=item4157146e4d#ht_4703wt_1163

sgbsteve · Jan 26, 2012

I'm drinking some Milk Oolong right now. This is my fourth or fifth time making it after picking up an ounce a while back. The other times I just didn't get it. My reaction was basically so it smells like popcorn, thats nice. But tonight I'm really enjoying it. Not sure why.

cynthetiq · Jan 26, 2012

Steep it again. When you're done. Steep it again for a bit longer. When you're done, steep it again for a few minutes longer. You should be able to do it at least 4-5 times.

I just bought some lapsang souchong and lychee red tea to bring with me to Iceland.

sgbsteve · Jan 26, 2012

I rarely have time to do it more than 3 times. probably because i use either a 12 or 24 ounce cup. the flavor does seem to get deeper each time. I dont think the leaves uncurl all the way the first and second times. they are rolled up in little balls when dry.

cynthetiq · Jan 26, 2012

sgbsteve said: ↑

I rarely have time to do it more than 3 times. probably because i use either a 12 or 24 ounce cup. the flavor does seem to get deeper each time. I dont think the leaves uncurl all the way the first and second times. they are rolled up in little balls when dry.
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do a preliminary rinse so that they start to unfurl before you do your steep.

I steep for 3 minutes about 200 temp. 1 teaspoon for 8oz.

Many will tell you to steep for 30-60 seconds, and do that with 212 water. If you do that, you'll get about 10 steeps from your leaves. It will be very good. I like a consistent brew, which is why I do 3 minutes.

since you're doing more water, add more leaves.

sgbsteve · Jan 27, 2012

I usually do about a teaspoon per 6oz. depending on the tea

EventHorizon · Jan 27, 2012

russian tea for me this morning

b2653009 · Jan 27, 2012

Had some lychee white tea this morning. Already had two cups. And they were really soothing, chilled me right the fuck out. It was awesome ^_____^

Baraka_Guru · Jan 27, 2012

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, somewhere above, but I'm currently drinking at Chinese green tea called yun cui, which translates to "green cloud." The description goes on about jade, based on its golden-green colour. It is rather beautiful.

As one who normally prefers Japanese green teas, this is the one Chinese green I enjoy a lot. I think it's because it's mellower than other Chinese greens.

Baraka_Guru · Jan 30, 2012

I broke down and bought Stash Tea's Super Irish Breakfast Tea despite it being sold in teabags. Loose Irish breakfast tea is not that easy to find here, apparently.

I've been craving a good Irish blend lately, and this stuff promised the boldest of the bold. It's actually not bad.

I should probably pick up a tin of the Twinings, as it's loose leaf at least. However, I'm now thinking about researching common blend ratios to see if I can mix my own. I could probably play around with some Assam and Ceylon leaves and come up with something I like. I know I can buy those separately at the place I normally go to.

snowy · Feb 1, 2012

Baraka_Guru said: ↑

I broke down and bought Stash Tea's Super Irish Breakfast Tea despite it being sold in teabags. Loose Irish breakfast tea is not that easy to find here, apparently.

I've been craving a good Irish blend lately, and this stuff promised the boldest of the bold. It's actually not bad.

I should probably pick up a tin of the Twinings, as it's loose leaf at least. However, I'm now thinking about researching common blend ratios to see if I can mix my own. I could probably play around with some Assam and Ceylon leaves and come up with something I like. I know I can buy those separately at the place I normally go to.
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Sachets are better than bags, if you can find an Irish blend in a sachet. I buy a fair bit of my tea in bags/sachets as it's inconvenient to brew loose leaf at my work.

Technically, these guys call theirs pouches, but I like their tea just fine: http://www.mightyleaf.com/index.cfm No Irish blend, though

Baraka_Guru · Feb 1, 2012

snowy said: ↑

Sachets are better than bags, if you can find an Irish blend in a sachet. I buy a fair bit of my tea in bags/sachets as it's inconvenient to brew loose leaf at my work.

Technically, these guys call theirs pouches, but I like their tea just fine: http://www.mightyleaf.com/index.cfm No Irish blend, though
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I rarely see sachets. As for Irish tea, it's going to be either tea bags or loose leaf. I brew at home almost exclusively, so I use a dedicated French press for the operation.

The only formats I can find for Irish tea is either tea bags or loose leaf. I'm thinking of just buying some quality loose Assam and maybe mixing it with a bit of Ceylon or Darjeeling to make my own Irishesque brew. It's my prerogative, being that I belong to the Irish diaspora.

Baraka_Guru · Feb 3, 2012

Although I disagree somewhat with some of their presets, I thought this website was pretty cute: http://steep.it/

cynthetiq · Feb 11, 2012

I was given this as an anniversary gift from my best friend along with two tins of tea.

So now o can French press. Today I'm on my third pot of tea from this teapot. I had another with dim sum.

cynthetiq · Feb 15, 2012

very tasty!!! no astringency at all!

King's 919 Dark 3rd Grade

TenRen's King's Dark Oolong Third grade consists of high quality oolong harvested from central Taiwan. The steeped tea has a light golden brown hue, mild roasted aroma with sweet undertones, the initial flavor of roasted chestnuts, and a sweet and roasted aftertaste which lingers at the back of the throat.

The water used to steep this tea should be about 185-195°F or 85-90°C. Use about 2 teaspoons (3 g) of tea leaves for about every 5 ounces (150 mL) of water. A steeping time of about 3-5 minutes with more or less time is recommended depending on the desired concentration. As a rough guide, the higher the temperature of the water or the greater the amount of leaves used, the shorter the steeping time should be. For the ultimate enjoyment, a traditional Chinese Yixing teapot is recommended for loose oolong tea. The teapot should be half filled with leaves and initially steeped for 45 seconds to 1 minute with the steeping time increased by an additional 15 seconds for each successive steeping. The leaves may be steeped multiple times. Net tea weight is 5.3 ounces (150 g). Shipping weight is 0.64 lb with canister and box.
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EventHorizon · Feb 15, 2012

i read "no insurgency at all" but your way works better i think

snowy · Feb 16, 2012

cynthetiq said: ↑

very tasty!!! no astringency at all!
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That sounds really good.

I just picked up a box of hojicha/bancha in sachets that I am looking forward to. My local tea shop stopped carrying loose hojicha and so I have been looking for an alternative. I am hoping this meets my needs. It will be nice to have portable hojicha.
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Came across this article in my Google Reader feed this morning, and thought I'd share it here. It's true--Portland loves a fine beverage.

Part I:

“Portland is a beverage town,” Steve Smith says simply. And his beverage of choice is — and always has been– tea.
Back in the early 1970s, Smith started Stash Tea, which sold teas and herbal infusions to natural food stores. The company grew to the point where it was sold to a Japanese tea company in 1993; tea drinkers can still find brightly colored tea bags and boxes in almost every restaurant, deli and food store in the country 40 years later. Except Starbucks.

Steven Smith
In 1994, Smith started Tazo Tea, a bit more traditional, a bit more refined in packaging, and it earned Smith the #13 spot on Gourmet Live’s Top 25 American Food Entrepreneurs list. Starbucks bought out the company in 2006.
Now — as of 2009 — Smith is simply Steven Smith Teamaker. His new company produces, packages, markets and even retails small batch, whole leaf teas and infusions out of a 100-year-old former blacksmith shop in an out-of-the-way corner of Northwest Portland.
From the quietly elegant tasting room/retail space to the large-windowed production area, Steven Smith Teamaker (the establishment, that is) seems to be the perfect end result of a lifetime of researching, producing, selling – and drinking a lot of – tea.
“When I first started Stash, we were so young, we were just kind of learning as we went,” Smith says.”Stash started from the remnants of a natural foods business; we were doing these herbal teas and infusions, and added black and green teas a little bit later.”
He considers for a moment: “In some ways (with Smith tea) we are still dealing with the same kind of consumer, someone who wants unique beverages and better quality. When we started Stash in the early 70s, there wasn’t much choice out there. That was the tagline we had for a long time, “A Choice for a Change.”
The initial customers were health food stores, co-ops, and juice bars. Soon after, they decided to head in more of a service direction, first on college campuses and then into restaurants.
“That is really very interesting, because when Stash was going into restaurants, it was a new thing,” he says. “Now just about every restaurant, no matter whether it is fine dining or family dining, or even fast food, there are different teas out there. I would guess that 90-plus percent of restaurants in North American serve some option of flavored tea.

“If you are a restaurant, you agonize over the meat, your produce selection, your coffee selection, you get the best product you can, your wine selection, the beers you serve,” he adds. “But what kind of tea do you serve? ‘Oh, whatever the coffee guy brings me.’ Not good. I think people are getting it now.”
After the sale of Stash, Smith took one step closer to his ideal. “(With Tazo) I felt if I could create a better tasting product, spend more money on materials and ingredients, that the bigger picture of the ingredients used in making the tea are one of smaller parts of the overall cost. The carton, the envelope, the tag, the string, the warehousing, all of that is a much bigger cost. ”

It worked; soon Tazo was competing with other major brands such as Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings and, of course, Stash, even though the Tazo product was about $2 a package higher in price than the other offerings.
“I felt that by increasing the quality of the product inside, that we could fundamentally change the way people felt about tea,” Smith explains.
Which brings us back to Steven Smith Teamaker, the business. It doesn’t look a traditional tea room. There are no tablecloths, no tea cozies. Nor is there any food. (Hence the preferred term “Tasting Room.”) Customers come here to smell, to taste, to watch the production team at work through the large windows into the work space, to relax and maybe enjoy a tea flight, and to walk out with a beautifully designed box full of meticulously produced liquid gold. Even the tea bags are beautiful – larger than average, and the sachet itself is made out of a material that looks more like finely woven gauze than paper. It almost seems sacrilegious to throw them out when they are done. The teas – black, green, white, a couple of oolongs, and a few infusions – aren’t available at your corner store. They are available through mail order, on site, through a few other specialty shops, or at Williams-Sonoma.

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[/QUOTE]from: http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/steven-smith-teamaker

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Part II:

The Williams-Sonoma deal almost didn’t happen, Smith says with a laugh, although the retailer was definitely on their hit list. For example, when they were designing the packaging that would be used, they called it the Williams-Sonoma Pack even before approaching them. “Once we got the mock-up of the package done, I sent an image to (them) and said ‘you’re getting the first look at this, because I think this is perfect for you.’ I didn’t tell them that we already called it the Wiiliams-Sonoma pack.”
They turned him down. A year later, they called back.
The quality of the packaging and the nice building are just window dressing, however. What makes Smith tea, Smith tea is the quality of the ingredients. Smith gets animated when he talks about sourcing.
“The black teas come primarily from India and Sri Lanka, and then in the northern region that borders Myanmar (formerly Burma) called Assam, the teas are dense and gutsy and robust and caramelized, and they are the basis for our Brahma tea,” he explains. “Nice complexity.
“Then further north and to the west, up in the hills, is Darjeeling. We don’t buy a lot of Southern Indian teas – they have nice leaf style, but they don’t have the character that we are looking for.”

So tea has terroir – literal translation, soil, but the term describes how food varies from region to region — too. “Absolutely.”In Sri Lanka, Smith buys tea from three different regions. He pulls out a map of Sri I Lanka and points out the three regions. “These three regions are separated by mere kilometers. For example, this would be Gresham, this would be Portland and this is Beaverton, but they have three completely different climates. There is this high ridge that runs through it, so when the monsoons hit one side of the island, the other side stays dry and that’s when you get the best tea.”
Botanicals are slightly different. The herbs, grasses, barks and berries that make up the infusions can come from multiple sources. “The thing with botanicals that is different from tea is that tea comes completely processed. It is rolled, it’s dried, sometimes it is fermented, sometimes it’s not, it is ready to use. We might sift it by hand, sort it to get it to the leaf size we want,” he explains. “But botanicals come in whole; we keep them whole until they are ready to be processed.
Once they are processed, once they are cut and sifted, that’s when they come to life.”

“I could have sold loose tea, but more people buy bagged tea because of convenience.” He cuts open the first tea bag. “Here’s a Tazo tea bag, which you have to use product that looks like this, a specific cut size, in order to make (the water) flow. The (tea) cut is much bigger than what you would normally see in a tea bag, large fannings, well sourced. ”The processing itself is integral to the quality of the tea. Smith heads out of his office for a moment, and returns with two tea bags, one Tazo, one Smith. The difference is remarkable.
He then indicates the Smith Tea bag, which is shaped differently, as well. He tears it open to reveal the tea inside. “With the Darjeeling, it’s hard to get all the subtlety unless you have tea that looks like this. ” Think dried herbs, rosemary for instance, instead of the powdery substance found in the average tea bag.
And when he says it is small batches, it is exactly that. Smith tea works in cycles, which are about 20 lbs, and a batch may be anywhere from two to five cycles of a particular product. A batch is whatever they will be able to sell in a specific amount of time.
“We can only run so many sachets a day, so we are limited in what we can produce in a single shift,” he adds. They are also limited by storage space, which makes the small batch model even more practical. “Everything is done by hand. We are limited in what we can produce, but in the two years we have been shipping, we have usually shipped our orders to our customers within two or three days tops.”
Another unique feature of Smith teas is that customers can trace the provenance of the tea they buy by going to the website and entering the Assortment Number on the front and side of the box. This is also done by hand; because the batches are small, the origins of the tea changes frequently. It is almost a uniquely Portland thing, just as Smith and Steven Smith Teamaker (the business) are.
“I am in the stage now where I think we have a business here,” he says. “The jury is out; we are more expensive, but we don’t want to be your tea for special occasions, we want to be the tea that you drink all the time. It really only costs about 75 cents a cup. Who said that tea should only cost 10 cents, 50 cents, who said that? “He shakes his head. “We have to show people that our version of what tea should taste like makes sense. “Laughs: “Sense, not cents.”
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from: http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/steven-smith-teamaker

AlterMoose · Feb 26, 2012

Anything black and extra-strong is good by my. That being said, the three big ones in my cupboard right now are Trader Joe's Irish breakfast blend, Lapsang Souchon, and rooibos. Once in a while, I like to steep a little sage with it, too. And my wife got me one of those flowering teapots for Christmas; I'm looking forward to using it.

snowy · Feb 29, 2012

I found a different boxed hojicha to try:

It's in sachets and it's really lovely. I have to see how many steeps I can get out of it, as it is more spendy that the other boxed hojicha I found.

Hojicha is rapidly becoming my replacement for Diet Pepsi, which I gave up for Lent.

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