Last week I wrote about Gary Vaynerchuck, Kevin Rose, and Jesse Jacobs talking tea and wine at http://leafboxtea.com, and I wrote about social media but not about tea. When asked about how much tea and how long for steeping times, he repeated several times that he often advised more tea and shorter steeping times.
I've been doing this more and more with varying results. When I put green tea in a paper filter, the third or fourth infusion is sometimes the last one that really has reasonable taste. Oolong lasts for a few more infusions, but I still think this form of brewing is not the optimal one for multiple infusions.
The Gong Fu style of brewing seems to be much better for this. As much as I've tried to modify more tea/shorter brewing times in a larger pot with a paper filter, it's not yet working so well.
I know this isn't normally a place where you find practical tea-making advice, but it is a teablog. I have to talk about tea sometimes, don't I?
I would say why not?
ReplyDeletePaper and tea don't seem the best way to make multiple infusions (do you imagine doing the same with coffee?) and the Gong Fu method is more tea oriented (which should suit us better).
I'm experimenting with large pot and more tea. I use two pots. Steeping lose leefs, no filter, in one, then pour over the tea into the second pot. I think Gong Fu brewing in small pot or Gaiwan is optimal, but I like to have a lot of tea ready at once.
ReplyDelete@manx
I think more tea and shorter infusion times really brings out the nuances in the different infusions. In general though, few teas are really that complex to result in more than subtle differences between more than 3 or so infusions.
ReplyDeleteThis, and convenience, is why I'm happy to brew most teas "western style"--which means if I use multiple infusions, they're with less leaf and infusion lengths of 3 or more minutes. But in the cases where western-style brewing makes 3 outstanding infusions of radically different character, it might be time to try gong fu brewing, or, at the very least, try using more leaf and shorter infusions, to see what happens!