fish eyes

Don't have one of those fancy kettles where you can adjust the temperature of the water. Keep hearing/reading people talk about machines that brew a perfect pot of tea, and I find myself going the other direction.

I'm no luddite. I like technology in many instances, but I'm often considering the simplest way of brewing tea. Over time, I've tried brewing a tea with boiling water for which I'd normally have used much cooler water. Talked with a Taiwanese tea shop owner a while back, and she insisted that she used very hot water for her best High Mountain Oolong. Tea that I'd been very cautious with until that point.

Not anymore.

Then a few people in the Google+ Hangout mentioned that they brewed many sorts of tea with water much hotter than I was accustomed. Rather than talk about specific temperatures, one or two of them mentioned different sorts of boiling water as it's described in the Chinese cooking culture.

The thing I remembered from the discussion was 'fish eyes'. The water starts to boil and the size of the bubbles can be described as 'shrimp eyes, crab eyes, fish eyes, rope of pearls, and raging torrent'. Tea Trade Peter found that when I asked about this in a Tea Trade forum (fish eyes).

I especially like the quote that Bram included in the discussion, so I'll leave you with that:

When the water is boiling, it must look like fishes’ eyes and give off but the hint of a sound. When at the edges it chatters like a bubbling spring and looks like pearls innumerable strung together, it reaches the second stage. When it leaps like breakers majestic and resounds like a swelling wave, it is at its peak. Any more and the water will be boiled out and should not be used.

The Classic of Tea (Cha Ching) by Lu Yu  (~ 800) (translation FR Carpenter)

(photo source: www.2dayblog.com)

you can brew tea in cold water?

that's Tie Guan Yin on the left and Silver Needle on the right

This is really a post for summertime. So all of you in the Southern Hemisphere will be happy. The rest of you are probably asking, 'Why not wait until it's seasonally appropriate? What's the story on a summer topic in the opening days of winter?' Well, in my defence, I started thinking about this in summer. And if I try to wait for the right time, I just might forget.

Over the summer, I read people talking about cold-brewing tea. Putting leaves in cold (not remotely warm) water and waiting until the leaves naturally steep into some delicious goodness. You can do that? It works? I'm here to tell you that it does.

Those of you that already know this are going to think it's a non-story. Of course it does. Why wouldn't it? Now I know that...but it was somehow beyond my understanding. My mother made sun tea when I was a child. In her case it was tea bags in a container of water that was set out in the sun. After several hours, the warmth of the sun had brewed up a really strong tea (that people ruined with ice cubes and various forms of sweetener), but that's because of the heat. Right?

If you want to make tea, you need either hot water or you need to add some sort of heat. Isn't that correct?

Not necessarily. Why have I been sitting on this since summer? Well, it's simple actually. I had to try it. I had to know it was true before I went off half-cocked about it (I know that's not my normal way-I'm well-known for going off half-cocked). And once I got started experimenting with cold-brewing tea, I couldn't stop. It became a sort of obsession.

That's why it was so timely when in the comments of a recent post Tea Trade Peter mentioned drinking white tea cold. Here's how he said it:

'Let’s start with why does tea have to be drunk hot? I like white tea, but when it is hot, I find that I cannot appreciate the flavors, but when it is just warm, or at a temperature just slightly above the room temperature so you still get the aromatics (though, I think they still come through at room temp). I’ve gotten to the point where I’d rather let my white tea cool off before I drink it, it just seems better that way.'

Now, he's talking about brewing it hot and letting it cool. It's not the same thing. But when I read what he'd written, I had unintentionally been doing exactly that with various white teas. After I got as much out of the leaves as I could with hot water, I went on and soaked those same leaves in cold water overnight. With astounding results.

It's not the same as tea brewed with hot water. There are times when the result is something like faintly-scented water. It's subtle...a lot like what I've recently written about white tea in general. There are also times that I've left leaves in cool water, forgotten about them entirely, and after a day or so, the resulting tea was as strong and flavourful as any hot-brewed concoction.

Here, let's move in a little for a closer look:

Don't really drink the leaves, ok? Pour these through some sort of filter.

My question is: Have you tried this? What were your results? Though I don't think I'd do this with any black tea, it's had unbelievable results with Oolong, green tea, and white tea. How about you? Any experience?

give us a slug of that Builder's Tea, yeah?

imagine the tea these builders might've brewed

A friend recently mentioned Builder's Tea to me, and I realised that I've never bothered writing about this before. It's not common parlance outside of Britain (not that I'm aware of), but it's such an evocative term. Here's what Wikipedia says about Builder's Tea.

It describes so brilliantly that milky, sugary sludge of black tea that your everyday typical British construction worker carries to the building site in his flask everyday. Sure, some drink it without milk and even more rare is a flask filled with Builder's Tea that has no sugar. The stuff is too strong. Too bitter.

You can drink it black, but it can't be good for you.

If you didn't have a look at Tea Trade Peter's account of drinking insanely strong black tea in Kosovo while he was serving in the army, do yourself a favour. Go read it. You can find it at:

Russian prison tea, Outpost Terminator and me

Go ahead and look now. I'll wait while you're gone. It's ok. I have time.

Doesn't that sound enticing and dangerous and delicious all at the same time?

I love these sorts of tea that people drink in such an unassuming manner. A little like the Grandpa Tea that I wrote about months ago. Throw leaves in a pot, add boiling water, wait a bit, drink it down, repeat with the same leaves ad infinitum.

You could be drinking all day from the same pinch of leaves if you do it right. Doesn't that sound great? It's the simplicity that gets me every time. Just me, some decent tea leaves and boiling hot water. What more could you want?