Banging out a quick chart with Google Chart Tools was pretty easy, but tweaking it to look just right seemed to be beyond me. I’m more likely to use Google’s chart for the first draft and touch it up in some other editor. For example, I found it difficult to align the tick marks, grid, and labels. The grid does not correspond to values, but percentage of range. Furthermore, the wizard accepts only integer values (12 or 13) while the URL accepts decimals (12.5). Thus tweaking of the URL is an absolute requirement.

Steeping the perfect cup of tea is a science. Most important of course are the tea leaves (or tips and/or stems), then the water, then temperature, then time. However, whether due to laziness or to ignorance, emphasis is too often precisely backwards.

For example, let’s take a typical but hypothetical New Jersey suburbanite. She uses the lowest quality tea dust, the stuff that fell through every conceivable crack in the cultivation, transportation, separation, and oxidization process (aka tea bags). She then dunks this powdered substance into a cold cup of cold tap water. Finally, she microwaves the tea cup from cold to boiling in precisely 2 minutes and 22 seconds. Why this particular time? Perhaps because 222 is convenient and produces a slightly better cup of tea that 111 or 333. I don’t know.

Time and temperature

Bitter tea is a product of steeping too long and too hot. Steeping too short or too cool will not extract much flavour. Of time and temperature, temperature is most important. Buy a thermometer and always preheat your teapot.

Do not trust recommended temperatures. Well, none but mine, of course. The recommendation is often, but not always, too high (I’ve never seen a temperature too low). I suspect this is based on the assumption that the average consumer will not preheat the teapot. Experiment; Get to know your teas.

Water

Tea is what — 99% water? You can do everything else right, but if your water sucks, so will your tea. An unfortunate population must boil a bitter perfumed black tea to mask foul liquid they call water. If you can not afford clean water, there are people who can help.

Tea

Tea quality is not entirely subjective. First of all, what may be called tea is not always, in fact, tea. Herbal ‘tea’ is not tea. Jasmine is not tea, nor is vanilla, rooiboos, bergamot, any type of fruit, oil, scent, spice, essence, perfume, grain, nor chemical. Only one humble species of plant, Camellia sinensis, is tea.

C. sinensis, also exclusively know as tea, has a few subspecies which are processed in generally four varieties, depending on the level of oxidization: white, green, oolong, and black. The quality of the leaves range from whole tips and leaves to powdered dust. Tea degrades in light and moisture. Otherwise, there is great diversity of flavour, colour, feel, scent, texture, and other subjective attributes.

Choosing a tea

Price is a poor gauge of quality or likely preference. My every day ‘table’ oolong from Fujian is half the price of a popular but inferior grade tea (purportedly from either France or Russia) and a seventh of the cost of a famous Wudong oolong I find nearly undrinkable. My absolute favourite oolong from Taiwan is priced somewhere between the latter two.

Find the tea variety you like best. Let me suggest some starting points. Silver Needle is the finest white tea by definition, otherwise White Peony is a fine choice. Gyokuro is the best Japanese green, but Sencha is the cheaper gold standard. Oolongs range anywhere between flowery perfume to rich caramel roasts. Wuyi Oolong (at 85 C) is my benchmark for all teas. Similarly, there is an enormous variety of black teas, from the light (technically oolong) Darjeeling to Keemun, Assam, and finally the powerful (almost fishy) shu pu’erh.

To understand teas, you must resist the temptation to cloak tea in scents, fruits, or oils. If your tea is unpalatable without sugar then (A) your tea sucks, (B) you’ve stewed it too hot, or (C) you don’t actually like tea.

Preparing tea

For sampling teas, I recommend the Gongfu Cha Dao method (yeah, that’s right, the kungfu of tea). While the Japanese, British, and others have ritualized tea making and pomp, only the Chinese ceremony focuses on flavour above all else.

Until you’re a black belt kungfu tea master, you will require a thermometer, timer and a kettle. Additionally, kungfu tea requires a tiny teapot (1-2 dL), a cooling pitcher, small cups, and of course crisp spring water and fine tea leaves. The Taiwanese introduce a few other tools, though I insist only on a fair pitcher. If you’ve got a catching tray, lucky you; I use four plates on which I have a yixing teapot, two matching pitchers and on the last plate, four small thin wide cups.

I pour hot (nearly boiling) water into the empty teapot and cooling pitcher. I place the thermometer into the cooling pitcher and wait for the appropriate temperature for the particular tea leaves (If I loose my zen, I may transfer some water between cups to accelerate the cooling process). When the temperature of the water in the cooling pitcher is almost perfect, I start boiling some more water and pour the teapot water evenly into the cups. In other words, get everything hot and slowly cool down.

I add the leaves to the teapot. Now the cycle begins.

I immediately pour the water from the cooling pitcher to the teapot (and tea). I set the timer (in reality, I just glance at the music player). I then refill the cooling pitcher with a fresh splash of nearly boiling water.

This last step is tricky and is what makes this something of an art. You want the cooling water to reach the perfect temperature at the same moment the tea has completed steeping. It’s actually a bit more complex than that; You don’t want to keep water perpetually boiling because it will loose oxygen and become flat, so you’ve got to sync the boiling, cooling, and steeped tea. This is kungfu, remember.

Anyway, once the tea has steeped at the perfect temperature for the perfect amount of time, pour your perfect tea from the teapot to the fair pitcher. Pour the perfectly warm water from the cooling pitcher to the teapot. Set the timer. Pour the tea from the fair pitcher to the emptied warm cups. Pour nearly boiling water from the kettle to the cooling pitcher. Enjoy your tea. Repeat.

To maximize this perfect absurdity, check out the Taiwanese additions which include scent cups. Each video on the net is worse than the next. Best of luck!

Once upon a time, long long ago, a fluffy snow flake fell gracefully from the heavens and landed softly somewhere on the ice sheet of Greenland.

Inevitably, more snow fell on top of him. And more snow, and more snow. He was happy to have so many friends. It was crowded but cozy. And day after day, year by year, millennium upon millennium, more snowy friends piled on top in suffocating layers of love.

So great was their bond, under their three kilometer deep weight, that they fused into dense crystals of ice. Together they oozed slowly toward the ocean for thousands of years over hundreds of kilometers, until one day.

Crack! A chunk of ice the size of a house crashed into the sea. Then began their majestic journey as a fresh water iceberg drifting along wind and current through the fjord.

This glorious sapphire of pure frozen water danced and mingled among other icebergs. Occasionally she scraped the sea floor or was bashed into unforgiving cliffs.

One day, when she landed upon some rocks and the tide receded she was met by an unsympathetic and disrespectful Antimetheus.

He tipped her and kicked her and smashed her into pieces. He stuffed her heart, 40 kilos of ancient transparent blood, into his backpack.

And with his dog, he carried her core to his home where he boiled her and steeped her with tea.

For he believed no better tea has been tasted, but that which comes from the Pleistocene.

[ These images are heavily cropped, click any above to view the full high res version. ] [ The fridge is filled with glass jars and plastic bottles, the freezer has a nice chunk, and a slightly iridescent but otherwise perfectly transparent ice cube is perpetually bobbing in a cauldron on the stove. ]

Capsaicin does not cause a chemical burn, but by binding to a vanilloid receptor, it signals the sensation of heat and abrasion to the brain. Dairy products (lipids) and alcohol (solvents) will alleviate the burning sensation. Water makes matters worse as the undissolved nonpolar capsaicin will be spread across the surface of the mouth among the polar water molecules.

Chili peppers are believed to have been consumed in the Americas since 7500 BCE but it wasn’t until Diego Álvarez Chanca brought the first chili peppers to Spain in 1493 that chilis spread around the world.

Wilbur Scoville first rated pepper strength in 1912 by combining various chili pepper extracts with sugar water until victims lost oral sensation. Today, we can measure the active chemicals capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin more accurately; One Scoville heat unit corresponds to one part capsaicin per 15 million.

References:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoville
www.ushotstuff.com/Heat.Scale.htm

Images produced by André Karwath and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.