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the german tea expert Ernst Janssen recommends to also use boiling water to prepare green tea as most of the teas are contaminated with germs and other things.

the german tea expert Ernst Janssen recommends to also use boiling water to prepare green tea as most of the teas are contaminated with germs and other things. different green tea brands including organic tea brands were tested by the renowned German test.de magazine and they confirmed that, also most of organic teas are contaminated. and since this is nothing you can easily check at home, better use boiling water. https://www.ernst-janssen.com/tee-almanach https://www.ernst-janssen.com/tee-almanach https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Stiftung-Warentest-bewertet-gruenen-Tee-Nur-zwei-Sorten-sind-gut-article23213999.html https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Stiftung-Warentest-bewertet-gru...

zokier 3y ago
That seems paranoid considering that I have never heard anyone getting food poisoning from tea, no matter how it was brewed. edit: Reading the linked article, it seems mostly concerned about contaminants and not germs. Intuitively thinking, I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from leaves to the drink than lower temps?
- StrangeATractor 3y ago
  Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about. As for boiling tea for sanitation, I took a wilderness first responder class and they taught us that you could bring water to a boil at any altitude a human can breath at (without holding it at a boil for 15 minutes as some claim) and it's considered sterilized. In Cusco, that would be around 191F/89C (humans can breathe quite a bit higher up than Cusco). Not a bad tea-brewing temp! Also, I suggest trying kukicha. It's high in l-theanine and lower in caffeine. Tasty too.
  - brianwawok 3y ago
    > Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about. How about the people touching / sneezing on it in the packaging factory?
    - nijave 3y ago
      Not sure about most things transferred via touch/sneeze but I imagine lack of moisture would cause anything living to die fairly quickly.
      - anjel 3y ago
        Except aflatoxin.
    - elif 3y ago
      If you source your green tea from a Japanese tea farm, this is really not a concern. Farm workers all wear gloves and masks, and the tea leaves are harvested directly from the tea bushes to a net via a machine. Additionally, the tea plants are covered by cloth for up to a month before harvest, dramatically reducing the chances of bird droppings. They are also steamed, rolled, and dried by mechanical devices which remove virtually all moisture.
      - yonaguska 3y ago
        Just a shout out to ikkyu tea, if you buy in bulk and get free shipping, it's a pretty good value for tea that you can trust.
  - nijave 3y ago
    I think it's a halflife/timing thing. Once it hits boiling, it's instance death for most microbials. You can keep it a lot lower for longer but it's also potentially difficult to tell the temperature (easier to say, bubbles? It's hot enough)
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Not really. Most microbes will be dead in a minute at about 70C. Milk pasteurization is done at 60C, after all. Most importantly, it'll kill salmonella. Some hardy bugs and/or spores can survive regular boiling anyway, so you're not aiming for total sterilization.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      It would be a really cool coincidence if the temperature at which water boils happened to be the magic number that killed most bacteria (unless it killed them because it boiled water they depend on to function or something), but I don't think that's the case - I think that boiling is something that's easy for humans to do and to perceive that also happens to be above the safe threshold and kill enough of the bacteria that harm us to make it a useful break point, even if the actual 212* isn't especially relevant.
  - rendaw 3y ago
    Many bacteria have mechanisms for surviving dry periods, ex: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00294-019-01036-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00294-019-01036-z
    - ascorbic 3y ago
      Unfortunately the bacteria that can survive drying-out are also the ones that survive boiling, so unless you're going to boil your tea in a pressure cooker it's not much help.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      We'd be drinking gamma ray sanitized tea if that had really been a problem. Honestly it sounds like mercury scare in seafood and pourover rice cooking for arsenic reduction, just not-invented-here behavior.
- taraparo 3y ago
  > I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from leaves to the drink than lower temps? that is actually an interesting aspect.
- morsch 3y ago
  The germ thing seems to go back to this 2005 press release by the BfR, which does indeed urge people to use boiling water to kill Salmonella particularly when preparing herbal tea. It doesn't cite any known cases or numbers: https://mobil.bfr.bund.de/de/presse/presseinformationen/2005/37/kraeutertees_unbedingt_mit_kochendem_wasser_aufgiessen-7096.html https://mobil.bfr.bund.de/de/presse/presseinformationen/2005... Searching further, there were a couple of cases of Salmonella in infants in 2003 that were traced to fennel anise tea. The timing fits. I couldn't find anything more recent, but I didn't look very hard. https://www.ernaehrungs-umschau.de/news/16-07-2003-salmonellenerkrankungen-vorbeugen/ https://www.ernaehrungs-umschau.de/news/16-07-2003-salmonell... Here's more data from government sources. They tested tea and herbal tea in 2008, and found traces of Salmonella or E.coli in 2-3% of prosecute products, and mold in 20%. Doesn't differentiate between herbal and real tea. https://www.lgl.bayern.de/lebensmittel/warengruppen/wc_47_tee/ue_2008_tee.htm https://www.lgl.bayern.de/lebensmittel/warengruppen/wc_47_te... I'm not worried. But then I usually use boiling water, or almost boiling water, which should be enough to kill micro organisms. And I'm sure I get more mold toxins from various other food sources without noticing it, cereals, nuts, processed foods etc. Tea is a dilution, after all.
  - amluto 3y ago
    You don’t need to boil salmonella to kill it: https://ourdailybrine.com/wp-content/uploads/our-daily-brine_salmonella-6.5D-reduction-table.pdf https://ourdailybrine.com/wp-content/uploads/our-daily-brine... You’ll have to work pretty hard to make a credible cup of tea with viable salmonella in it.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      The more sensitive "proper" teas are well into the danger zones e.g. gyokuros tend to be brewed between 50C and 60C, and with brewing times under 3mn. Never really heard of hard thermal limits for herbals though, in my experience they're more resilient and less caring, and you can long-boil most of them like you'd do a middling black tea.
      - amluto 3y ago
- mint2 3y ago
  Yes this doesn’t really make sense unless it would denature any toxins which doesn’t seem that likely and will do nothing for any pesticide or heavy metal contamination except possibly extract more.
- ruph123 3y ago
  A person I know had to get tested for toxins at work regularly and at some point showed really high arsenic levels. At which point they had to figure out what poisoned him. He worked in material science but no materials he handled would have given off arsenic to his body. After some investigating, they found out that the Pu'Erh tea he consumed was the culprit. They tested the tea in a lab and after he stopped drinking it, his levels became normal. So that might not kill.you but I guess having these toxins in you body cannot be good either. Since then I try to only buy teas which are lab-tested. When I lived in Germany I bought my teas at sunday. Tbey tell you harvest, growing conditions and many more things and they also claim to lab test the tea badges. I haven't found anything comparable in the US yet. https://www.sunday.de/long-jing-shi-feng-tee/ https://www.sunday.de/long-jing-shi-feng-tee/
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - foobarbecue 3y ago
    Boiling isn't going to do anything about arsenic.
    - ruph123 3y ago
      Sure, just wanted to add a data point about food poisoning yourself with tea.
      - rexpop 3y ago
        Colloquially, "food poisoning" refers exclusively to (per Wikipedia) "Foodborne illness (also foodborne disease and food poisoning); any illness resulting from the spoilage of contaminated food by pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites."
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      You might want to use water with high level of iron though. My grandfather used to use arsenic to brew cider because its local water had really high levels of iron.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  > Intuitively thinking, I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from > leaves to the drink than lower temps? If we're discussing non-volatiles such as heavy metals, boiling acually concentrates them by removing some of the water. This is more of a concern with the water than with the tea, however if one is already bringing up the health aspects then obviosly neither can be ignored.
- ioslipstream 3y ago
  It’s not a matter of food poisoning, it’s a matter of do you really want to ingest contaminants. Regular consumption of contaminants such as pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics (all present in the water supply especially at lower elevations) has an impact on long term health.
stametseater 3y ago
All foodstuffs are contaminated with germs, unless you go to extraordinary effort to prevent it (e.g. intense gamma radiation.) Unless there is some particular reason to care (you're a hospital feeding people who had their bone marrow nuked by cancer/chemo), then the correct solution is to stop caring. Who ever heard of people dropping dead because they brewed their tea with sub-boiling water? This isn't happening, it's not something you should worry about.
- thfuran 3y ago
  People mostly get by fine without boiling their salads but they do occasionally get e coli or something.
  - vba616 3y ago
    They occasionally get hepatitis or something and die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-Chi%27s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-Chi%27s Oddly, the restaurants are gone, but there is salsa using the brand in some supermarkets still. I wouldn't buy it, even though it presumably is just someone else using the logo.
    - phito 3y ago
      They still exist in my country! (Belgium)
  - stametseater 3y ago
    That's widely understood, but I hope nobody is boiling their salads in response to that statistic. Maybe tomorrow I'll trip on my shoelace and crack my skull open on the sidewalk, but I'm not going to wear a helmet just in case. There is an endless supply of extremely low probability ways to die, but if you spend your time worrying about all that crap you'll ironically hasten your own demise by stressing yourself out. Round those small possibilities down to zero and stop worrying about it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
Dreck reinigt den Magen. Stellt Euch nicht so an, Ihr Weicheier!
- golem14 3y ago
  Obligatory reference: "You are all diseased" by Geoerge Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo
throwaway09223 3y ago
> "germs and other things" This is faulty reasoning. The typical "almost boiling" temperature of 185F for 3 minutes will sterilize the tea just as well as boiling water would. There's absolutely no benefit in terms of safety. The only consideration would be flavor.
WillPostForFood 3y ago
If you are paranoid about salmonella in tea, 185F for 15 seconds is enough, and it won't ruin teas that taste better at lower temps.
- Schiphol 3y ago
  Or you can top your drink up with very hot/boiling water after brewing
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
gpvos 3y ago
No need to boil. 80 or 90 degrees is enough to kill germs nearly instantly, 70 degrees takes a little longer.
makeitdouble 3y ago
While I get the logic, it feels a lot like a "cook your salad to get rid of potential pathogens" strategy. Sure it's safer, but did you really want to boil your salad ? There surely must be other ways to get probably safe food than boiling everything you drink.
Semaphor 3y ago
Without buying the test, looks my tea vendor (Tee Gschwender) once again was at the top, so I think I’m good ;)
astura 3y ago
This seems extremely paranoid. I cold brew green (and black) tea and drink multiple cups a day.
bradhe 3y ago
This is an extremely German world view.
Loranubi 3y ago
Boiling doesn't even kill most things. I worked in a biolab for a while and used an autoclave to sterilize objects. It basically means we pressure cooked stuff at 130°C for 45min or so. And even that doesn't destroy some dangerous stuff like prions.

zokier 3y ago

That seems paranoid considering that I have never heard anyone getting food poisoning from tea, no matter how it was brewed. edit: Reading the linked article, it seems mostly concerned about contaminants and not germs. Intuitively thinking, I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from leaves to the drink than lower temps?

StrangeATractor 3y ago
Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about. As for boiling tea for sanitation, I took a wilderness first responder class and they taught us that you could bring water to a boil at any altitude a human can breath at (without holding it at a boil for 15 minutes as some claim) and it's considered sterilized. In Cusco, that would be around 191F/89C (humans can breathe quite a bit higher up than Cusco). Not a bad tea-brewing temp! Also, I suggest trying kukicha. It's high in l-theanine and lower in caffeine. Tasty too.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  > Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about. How about the people touching / sneezing on it in the packaging factory?
  - nijave 3y ago
    Not sure about most things transferred via touch/sneeze but I imagine lack of moisture would cause anything living to die fairly quickly.
    - anjel 3y ago
      Except aflatoxin.
  - elif 3y ago
    If you source your green tea from a Japanese tea farm, this is really not a concern. Farm workers all wear gloves and masks, and the tea leaves are harvested directly from the tea bushes to a net via a machine. Additionally, the tea plants are covered by cloth for up to a month before harvest, dramatically reducing the chances of bird droppings. They are also steamed, rolled, and dried by mechanical devices which remove virtually all moisture.
    - yonaguska 3y ago
      Just a shout out to ikkyu tea, if you buy in bulk and get free shipping, it's a pretty good value for tea that you can trust.
- nijave 3y ago
  I think it's a halflife/timing thing. Once it hits boiling, it's instance death for most microbials. You can keep it a lot lower for longer but it's also potentially difficult to tell the temperature (easier to say, bubbles? It's hot enough)
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Not really. Most microbes will be dead in a minute at about 70C. Milk pasteurization is done at 60C, after all. Most importantly, it'll kill salmonella. Some hardy bugs and/or spores can survive regular boiling anyway, so you're not aiming for total sterilization.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    It would be a really cool coincidence if the temperature at which water boils happened to be the magic number that killed most bacteria (unless it killed them because it boiled water they depend on to function or something), but I don't think that's the case - I think that boiling is something that's easy for humans to do and to perceive that also happens to be above the safe threshold and kill enough of the bacteria that harm us to make it a useful break point, even if the actual 212* isn't especially relevant.
- rendaw 3y ago
  Many bacteria have mechanisms for surviving dry periods, ex: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00294-019-01036-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00294-019-01036-z
  - ascorbic 3y ago
    Unfortunately the bacteria that can survive drying-out are also the ones that survive boiling, so unless you're going to boil your tea in a pressure cooker it's not much help.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    We'd be drinking gamma ray sanitized tea if that had really been a problem. Honestly it sounds like mercury scare in seafood and pourover rice cooking for arsenic reduction, just not-invented-here behavior.
taraparo 3y ago
> I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from leaves to the drink than lower temps? that is actually an interesting aspect.
morsch 3y ago
The germ thing seems to go back to this 2005 press release by the BfR, which does indeed urge people to use boiling water to kill Salmonella particularly when preparing herbal tea. It doesn't cite any known cases or numbers: https://mobil.bfr.bund.de/de/presse/presseinformationen/2005/37/kraeutertees_unbedingt_mit_kochendem_wasser_aufgiessen-7096.html https://mobil.bfr.bund.de/de/presse/presseinformationen/2005... Searching further, there were a couple of cases of Salmonella in infants in 2003 that were traced to fennel anise tea. The timing fits. I couldn't find anything more recent, but I didn't look very hard. https://www.ernaehrungs-umschau.de/news/16-07-2003-salmonellenerkrankungen-vorbeugen/ https://www.ernaehrungs-umschau.de/news/16-07-2003-salmonell... Here's more data from government sources. They tested tea and herbal tea in 2008, and found traces of Salmonella or E.coli in 2-3% of prosecute products, and mold in 20%. Doesn't differentiate between herbal and real tea. https://www.lgl.bayern.de/lebensmittel/warengruppen/wc_47_tee/ue_2008_tee.htm https://www.lgl.bayern.de/lebensmittel/warengruppen/wc_47_te... I'm not worried. But then I usually use boiling water, or almost boiling water, which should be enough to kill micro organisms. And I'm sure I get more mold toxins from various other food sources without noticing it, cereals, nuts, processed foods etc. Tea is a dilution, after all.
- amluto 3y ago
  You don’t need to boil salmonella to kill it: https://ourdailybrine.com/wp-content/uploads/our-daily-brine_salmonella-6.5D-reduction-table.pdf https://ourdailybrine.com/wp-content/uploads/our-daily-brine... You’ll have to work pretty hard to make a credible cup of tea with viable salmonella in it.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    The more sensitive "proper" teas are well into the danger zones e.g. gyokuros tend to be brewed between 50C and 60C, and with brewing times under 3mn. Never really heard of hard thermal limits for herbals though, in my experience they're more resilient and less caring, and you can long-boil most of them like you'd do a middling black tea.
    - amluto 3y ago
mint2 3y ago
Yes this doesn’t really make sense unless it would denature any toxins which doesn’t seem that likely and will do nothing for any pesticide or heavy metal contamination except possibly extract more.
ruph123 3y ago
A person I know had to get tested for toxins at work regularly and at some point showed really high arsenic levels. At which point they had to figure out what poisoned him. He worked in material science but no materials he handled would have given off arsenic to his body. After some investigating, they found out that the Pu'Erh tea he consumed was the culprit. They tested the tea in a lab and after he stopped drinking it, his levels became normal. So that might not kill.you but I guess having these toxins in you body cannot be good either. Since then I try to only buy teas which are lab-tested. When I lived in Germany I bought my teas at sunday. Tbey tell you harvest, growing conditions and many more things and they also claim to lab test the tea badges. I haven't found anything comparable in the US yet. https://www.sunday.de/long-jing-shi-feng-tee/ https://www.sunday.de/long-jing-shi-feng-tee/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  Boiling isn't going to do anything about arsenic.
  - ruph123 3y ago
    Sure, just wanted to add a data point about food poisoning yourself with tea.
    - rexpop 3y ago
      Colloquially, "food poisoning" refers exclusively to (per Wikipedia) "Foodborne illness (also foodborne disease and food poisoning); any illness resulting from the spoilage of contaminated food by pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites."
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    You might want to use water with high level of iron though. My grandfather used to use arsenic to brew cider because its local water had really high levels of iron.
dotancohen 3y ago
> Intuitively thinking, I'd imagine higher temps would end up extracting more of those from > leaves to the drink than lower temps? If we're discussing non-volatiles such as heavy metals, boiling acually concentrates them by removing some of the water. This is more of a concern with the water than with the tea, however if one is already bringing up the health aspects then obviosly neither can be ignored.
ioslipstream 3y ago
It’s not a matter of food poisoning, it’s a matter of do you really want to ingest contaminants. Regular consumption of contaminants such as pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics (all present in the water supply especially at lower elevations) has an impact on long term health.

stametseater 3y ago

All foodstuffs are contaminated with germs, unless you go to extraordinary effort to prevent it (e.g. intense gamma radiation.) Unless there is some particular reason to care (you're a hospital feeding people who had their bone marrow nuked by cancer/chemo), then the correct solution is to stop caring. Who ever heard of people dropping dead because they brewed their tea with sub-boiling water? This isn't happening, it's not something you should worry about.

thfuran 3y ago
People mostly get by fine without boiling their salads but they do occasionally get e coli or something.
- vba616 3y ago
  They occasionally get hepatitis or something and die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-Chi%27s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-Chi%27s Oddly, the restaurants are gone, but there is salsa using the brand in some supermarkets still. I wouldn't buy it, even though it presumably is just someone else using the logo.
  - phito 3y ago
    They still exist in my country! (Belgium)
- stametseater 3y ago
  That's widely understood, but I hope nobody is boiling their salads in response to that statistic. Maybe tomorrow I'll trip on my shoelace and crack my skull open on the sidewalk, but I'm not going to wear a helmet just in case. There is an endless supply of extremely low probability ways to die, but if you spend your time worrying about all that crap you'll ironically hasten your own demise by stressing yourself out. Round those small possibilities down to zero and stop worrying about it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago

Dreck reinigt den Magen. Stellt Euch nicht so an, Ihr Weicheier!

golem14 3y ago
Obligatory reference: "You are all diseased" by Geoerge Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo

throwaway09223 3y ago

> "germs and other things" This is faulty reasoning. The typical "almost boiling" temperature of 185F for 3 minutes will sterilize the tea just as well as boiling water would. There's absolutely no benefit in terms of safety. The only consideration would be flavor.

WillPostForFood 3y ago

If you are paranoid about salmonella in tea, 185F for 15 seconds is enough, and it won't ruin teas that taste better at lower temps.

Schiphol 3y ago
Or you can top your drink up with very hot/boiling water after brewing

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

gpvos 3y ago

No need to boil. 80 or 90 degrees is enough to kill germs nearly instantly, 70 degrees takes a little longer.

makeitdouble 3y ago

While I get the logic, it feels a lot like a "cook your salad to get rid of potential pathogens" strategy. Sure it's safer, but did you really want to boil your salad ? There surely must be other ways to get probably safe food than boiling everything you drink.

Semaphor 3y ago

Without buying the test, looks my tea vendor (Tee Gschwender) once again was at the top, so I think I’m good ;)

astura 3y ago

This seems extremely paranoid. I cold brew green (and black) tea and drink multiple cups a day.

bradhe 3y ago

This is an extremely German world view.

Loranubi 3y ago

Boiling doesn't even kill most things. I worked in a biolab for a while and used an autoclave to sterilize objects. It basically means we pressure cooked stuff at 130°C for 45min or so. And even that doesn't destroy some dangerous stuff like prions.