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Oxidation makes tea black
- chasil 5y agoI had always understood that white tea had minimal processing, so I don't understand this assertion: "Without oxidation, tea would taste unbearably bitter." Perhaps white tea has not reached an adult phase with the associated bitterness. Contast to: "White tea may refer to... minimally processed leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tea
- cmogni1 5y agoWhite tea is oxidized naturally for a while. The article is referring to freshly picked leaves.
- foo_barrio 5y agoThat would be green tea no? You pick the green tea, cook it to denature the enzymes to arrest the oxidization (called the "killgreen" step in Chinese) and voila, green tea! Lots of green teas can be quite smooth and even more so with more careful brewing.
- yvdriess 5y agoYes, green tea needs lower temperature and controlled infusion time, but rewards that. The author definitely does not seem to be a fan and is not doing it justice.
- cmogni1 5y agoYeah! Green tea gets fried or steamed right away to halt oxidation. That kills off some of the undesirable bitterness that masks some flavors that are even present in fresh leaves. It is not that Green doesn’t have any taste; it is that there are more guardrails over what flavors can appear and how distinct they can be.
- hinkley 5y agoThe Brit I mentioned elsewhere seemed to think it was the drying that arrested the chemical processes in the tea. He was also adamant about storing it in well sealed containers out of direct sunlight. I ended up throwing away a couple of containers because of this (although I've kept a couple that are just too beautiful to part with - I store my daily drinker in there since it doesn't need to keep as long). Also explains why my dealer uses mylar vacuum packs for anything over an ounce. No oxygen, no light.
- foo_barrio 5y agoWhite tea does not undergo the "killgreen" step that green teas and oolongs teas do IIRC. The drying slows the oxidation but does not arrest it. "Aged" white tea is a thing. If you let it sit around long enough it turns deep red. Green tea just turns into stale tea. They even compress white teas into something similar to those "Pu'er Cakes".
- chasil 5y agoThe odd thing is that the range (and top end) of antioxidants in white tea is larger than in green. "Total catechin content (TCC) for white teas ranged widely from 14.40 to 369.60 mg/g of dry plant material for water extracts and 47.16 to 163.94 mg/g for methanol extracts. TCC for green teas also ranged more than 10-fold, from 21.38 to 228.20 mg/g of dry plant material for water extracts and 32.23 to 141.24 mg/g for methanol extracts." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20722909/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20722909/
- hinkley 5y agoIs it odd or is it thermal breakdown of chemicals?
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- hinkley 5y agoTraditionally white tea was created from tea buds. If you've ever gardened, you know how dicey those first few days are because the plants that have defenses against caterpillars and slugs are vulnerable until the leaves are fully formed. Caffeine is a pesticide, and the young shoots don't contain much of it. Last I remembered looking, white tea has about the same caffeine as decaffeinated coffee (which I use both as a sales pitch for getting people to try white tea and a warning against people complaining about having trouble sleeping - there's still caffeine in your decaf, buddy). Since you pick the leaves before they are grown, you're pruning the tree and potentially reducing your crop. Which is why it was a drink of the nobility. Basically you're so rich you can afford to reduce your crop by (conjecture) 10% for a taste sensation, or pay someone else for the privilege. I suspect we have so much of it now because 1) Republic of Tea basically went through every tea fad in the history of tea in a 15 year period, presumably to keep sales numbers up with novelty, and 2) it's likely that there is oversupply in the tea market, so white tea gives you another shot at a sale. Unlike coffee, which gets one harvest per year (although some people are trying to bring coffee leaf tea into the group consciousness), it's typical to get at least 2 harvests of tea per year, 3 or more in a great year. Which I discovered when I noticed my dealer putting numbers and/or seasons on her tea. If they are regrowing that fast then white tea might not be that big of a burden.
- aradox66 5y agoThe website is new, but this business also runs one of my favorite brick and mortar tea shops! It's in the Oakland hills. They pile up the steaming leaves from every cup they brew and the shop fills with the earthy caramel aroma of good tea.
- jeffbee 5y agoIt's going to be even better with the new plaza on Antioch.
- dijondreams 5y agoditto, one of the best stores i know of
- andjd 5y agoMay just be the prices on their website, but they strike me as being quite expensive. They also use anglicized names with very little information about the tea, so it's hard to know what you're buying.
- dijondreams 5y agoyeah it's definitely expensive but that's mainly because they go to China every year to each farm to find the best teas. they will go into depth on each and every one if you inquire
- hammock 5y agoMost things that are black are oxidized
- lambic 5y agoCan anyone explain this sentence: "Because tannins weigh more than catechins, they do not taste bitter."
- cmogni1 5y agoHigher weight polyphenols tend to taste less bitter than lower weight ones. Its more correlation than causation because I don’t think we precisely know why this is.
- hinkley 5y agoI wonder if they're talking about the blurred lines between taste and smell. Most of what we 'taste' is happening in our nose. Turns out the French and Italians with all of their fancy wine glasses for different kinds of wine are not insane. Glass shape effects the timing of scent versus taste, and so lighter wines have a narrower glass to shorten the time. The heavier the red the wider the glass.
- prophesi 5y ago"Contrary to popular belief, Red teas like Darjeeling actually have less caffeine than White or Green teas because they are so highly processed." Is this actually true? I've never heard of green tea having more caffeine than red tea, besides maybe gunpowder green tea, which retains more caffeine due to less breakage from being rolled up.
- Bayart 5y agoI think lighter teas does have more caffeine per weight, but they're have much shorter infusion times (with the exception of Pu'er, which can go through15 infusions).
- radicaldreamer 5y agoSame thing with coffee, light roasts have more extractable caffeine than dark roasts.
- prophesi 5y agoAh that would make sense. And water temperature likely plays a vital role as well. But for properly brewed green tea, it will still result in less caffeine than red tea as expected.
- hinkley 5y agoI think it's some of both. I emulate my dealer (Taiwanese direct importer), who intimated that she skips the strainer with her green tea and just puts here whole leaf green tea straight into the cup (you can only do this with whole leaf, as your lip becomes the strainer and broken tea ends up in your teeth). She reuses the same cup all day, topping it off when it's half full. When I space and drain it (often in the middle of a coding session), it still tastes and acts like tea for at least the first three cups, after that it gets pretty weak, until I abandon it for a good long while and then discover it's gone from weak to bitter.
- hackernewds 5y agoRed tea from Darjeeling is in a category called CTC tea, which is distinct from what you'd expect from black tea. Easy mixup since they look similar, besides the packaging
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- amelius 5y agoTangential. Has anyone tried Tulsi tea? I recently did and got a bad experience from it. I think it has some psychoactive substance in it.
- throwaway1777 5y agoTulsi, aka holy basil, has a lot of effects, but not really psychoactive ones. It’s generally thought to have a wide range of beneficial properties on stress, the immune system, etc but it does disagree with some people too.
- hinkley 5y agoI stumbled into a presentation on tea at a tea festival a number of years ago. I keep meaning to figure out which notebook my notes are in and make copies because it was so good. The presenter was this elderly British gent with a background in operations who got sent out to figure out how to boost tea output. There were a bunch of charts about time and temperature and humidity for various types of tea but the biggest fact was slightly buried. 'fermentation' with respect to tea is a bit of a euphemism. It's actually autolysis. The big epiphany moment for me was connecting the dots and seeing why that was the case. Caffeine is an insecticide. It's stored in little crystals in the tissue. With oxalic acid, the crystals are the point. They're sharp and they damage the attacker. With caffeine it's metabolic disruption. Within other organelles in the tea leaf are enzymes that can decompose the caffeine crystals into a solluble form. These chemicals only mix when the leaf is bruised, or masticated. They are booby trapped. When you process camellia sinensis into tea, the oldest process is matcha, which started in China and is now mostly preserved in Japan, is drying the leaves and then powdering them, which I presume frees up some of the caffeine simply by mechanical decomposition. For the others the leaves are processed by bruising, heating and drying the leaves, and the order and duration dictates which kind of tea you get, and how much of the caffeine has been converted to a form that is water soluble. Black tea is aged longer, and has more available caffeine. Almost none of them are actually fermented as in beer (puehr is the most notable, and the common reaction upon smelling it is, "This reminds me of my grandmother's garden." It is an acquired taste.) Edit: and kombucha, which is fermented after being steeped, rather than before. Also by many accounts an acquired taste.
- ianai 5y agoI love pu erh tea! Though I worry about good sources of it. Brew-wise you can brew it very long and at high temperatures and it’ll be stronger, but not necessarily ruined. I can understand calling it an acquired taste, but it probably comes the closest to fulfilling a similar coffee taste of the teas.
- almog 5y agoThat's a very good description of the enzymatic process in tea. Regarding "oldest process" though, I'm not sure which is the earliest processing method for tea but compressed tea / tea bricks as Pu-erh (although compressed tea ≠ Pu-erh) is attributed to Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) and it precedes Matcha which is attributed to the Song dynasty period (960–1279).
- hbarka 5y agoThe other dark tea, the fermented tea they mention in this article aka hei cha or commonly referred to as pu’er, scares me because there are bad quality versions of it containing mold due to their fermentation process. Hard to detect since it’s also a kind of black tea.
- feanaro 5y agoIt's not a black tea, at least in the western sense. Our black tea is actually called hong cha in Chinese, which means red tea. They're simply different types of tea. There are also two different style pf pu'ers which have little to do with each other. The style you're talking about is shu pu'er, which is deliberately piled and made wet in order to trigger a sped up fermentation process. This is opposed to sheng pu'er, which is processed into bricks from very young, raw leaves called maocha, and is then aged for a number of years before it is drank. This results in a much slower and subtler fermentation process. The taste of shu and sheng are quite different. I've never personally had an encounter with a bad batch of either shu or sheng pu'er, but the shu variant is more prone to this due to the process. It's notable that pu'er is steeped at a (close to) 100 degrees celsius and the first one or two short steepings are discarded. This is to kill and wash off any microorganisms or dirt that may be present.
- hbarka 5y agoThank you, that’s informative.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoPuerh is not heicha. Puerh comes in two varieties, only one of which commonly counts as heicha. Heicha is a variety of tea preparation styles that involves post-processing fermentation. This also includes Eg. Fu bricks or liubao. https://www.teaformeplease.com/tea-nerd-dictionary-heicha/ https://www.teaformeplease.com/tea-nerd-dictionary-heicha/
- HumanReadable 5y agoIt's pretty easy to spot mold in your pu'er whether it's shu or sheng. I wouldn't worry about it.
- noufalibrahim 5y agoAn interesting colour change I've noticed it when you squeeze lemon into dark (almost black) tea. It lightens up a lot and becomes a pale brown. I'm not sure what but there is some chemical change going on there.
- skibob1027 5y ago“The thearubigins in brewed tea are highly coloured (red-brown) molecules that change according to the acidity of the liquid used. If the water used for the tea infusion is relatively alkaline (for example, due to limescale found in “hard” water), the colour of the tea will be darker and deeper. However, once an acid such as a slice of lemon or lemon juice is added, tea changes colour because of an increase in acidity (reduction in pH) of the beverage itself. Lemon juice is quite strong as a food acid – a few drops are enough to alter the theaurbigins, resulting in a dramatic change in colour. Interestingly, theaflavins are not that affected by the change in acidity, and still retain their normal dark red colour.” Source: https://theconversation.com/ive-always-wondered-why-does-lemon-juice-lighten-the-colour-of-tea-91324 https://theconversation.com/ive-always-wondered-why-does-lem...
- Teracotage 5y agoHow about manipulating Oxidation of your tea cup? I add a squeeze of lemon and the tea lightens up in color, and it lasts longer before it tastes stale. In addition to lemon, I would add either cardamom,or cinnamon, or event mint leaves, and the over-oxidation that would make my cup of tea go stale will be delayed. I am that lazy tea drinker who is OD'ing on tea/j.
- timonoko 5y agoI was sort of suffering from colored tooths (teeth?) problem. Meaning every time I took selfie I suffered about 5 seconds. The bloody dentist suggested monthly visits to the bloody dental hygienists. Strange thing happened: I was flying my kite for kite aerial photography and a chinese ((or taiwanese) or japanese) tourist noted my blackened teeth an told that green tea does not color. And it worked ok. Even the cheapest Lidl tea works ok. I bit of acquired taste, but you will learn to love it.
- mgkimsal 5y agopfft.... what do the Chinese know about tea? ;)
- timonoko 5y agoShudup son. There is a very special connection between China Tea and Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlMYrblsZp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlMYrblsZp4 I have tasted genuine Silver Needles but was not impressed.
- odiroot 5y ago> I was flying my kite for kite aerial photography and a chinese ((or taiwanese) or japanese) tourist noted my blackened teeth an told that green tea does not color. And it worked ok. I think black (red) tea is very much worth it. I just couldn't do without at least a single cup a day. I do brush my teeth afterwards though.
- dgarrett 5y agoI’ve been told by a dentist specifically not to brush your teeth after tea. Instead, swish your mouth with water and brush your teeth later. The claim is that the acidity of the tea will soften your teeth and lead to damage from the brushing.
- markdown 5y agoNever brush your teeth straight after eating/drinking. Give it an hour at least.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoThis is a pretty thorough intro to (mostly) Chinese tea, which seems fair to me since tea originated in China. Though I can see a few details to quibble over (e.g., some Taiwanese oolongs are barely oxidized, ~5% for Baozhongs sometimes[1]). Personally as much as I like white, green, and black teas, I think oolongs have the most variation, since they can have a mix of the characteristics of the other types. But I drink plenty of them all. 1: https://teadb.org/baozhong/ https://teadb.org/baozhong/
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- mproud 5y agoHow can you tell if a tea is oxidized or not? Darker, black tea is more oxidized, and because it is, it has a larger flavor profile, as opposed to the bitter, less oxidized Green tea. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
- m0llusk 5y agoblack teas matter
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago