Welcome to the Friday Roundtable, where we want to hear about your tea experience. Each week we present a topic that affects us all as tea business owners and tea consumers. Let’s talk tea.
This week we’re thinking about water. The importance of water cannot be underestimated when it comes to tea preparation. Too hot and you’ve boiled your greens. Too cool and you’ve left the complex flavors sitting in your pile of tea leaves. Too many minerals in the water and you’ve dulled the taste. “Dead” water, that’s been boiled multiple times, is also said to ruin the taste.
There are many questions we could have asked about this topic. For example, we could have asked you to confess to your propensity to microwave your water (shame, shame). Instead, we wanted to ask about how you ensure you have the best quality water.
Some tea makers will only utilize bottled water, an expensive prospect for heavy tea drinkers. There are purifiers in pitcher form like Brita and PUR. There are advanced models that are plumbed into your pipes. Newer versions, like Brondell’s H20+ Cypress, aim to reduce the plumbing challenges by sitting on the countertop and connecting to the faucet.
I’ve tried all of these methods. How about you? What is your preferred way of obtaining high quality water for your tea?
My regular readers know that caffeine is a topic of particular interest to me. Tea drinkers are often in search of information about caffeine content in their cup and, unfortunately, the information disseminated is often based on rumor and tradition versus current research and science.
We covered some of the myth and lore of caffeine on Tea Biz previously (article) but I’m always interested in what other tea enthusiasts and experts have to say.
* What are the most frequent caffeine questions that come your way?
* What questions would you like answered by future research?
BTW – If you haven’t yet read Kevin Gascoyne’s Tea: History, Terroirs, and Varieties, it’s an excellent addition to the conversation. His team at Camellia Sinensis has been working on putting science behind our answers with chemical analyses of caffeine and antioxidant levels in various teas.
TWEET: What tea-based cocktails make their way into your martini glasses or champagne flutes?
Looking for a new cocktail for your summer parties? As tea lovers we’re usually happy to add another tea element to our events. Fortunately for us, New York-based company The Teaologist is the latest entrant into the specialty tea cocktail arena with their Owl’s Brew line.
Tea Forté was one of the early arrivals into that market more than four years ago. Tea Forté Cocktail Infusions are pyramid sachets containing tea and herbs designed to infuse in alcohol. Customers have been encouraged to develop new recipes for the Lavender Citrus, Silkroad Chai, and Lemongrass Mint pyramids and an online archive now includes gems like Chai White Russians, Lavender Pear Martinis, and Violet Lavender Gin Sours. It was a unique concept and introduced many to the idea of tea in our highball glasses.
Owl’s Brew takes a different approach, offering their teas as liquid mixers. They wanted the convenience of freshly brewed whole leaf tea and spices that were ready-to-pour. There are three flavors currently: the chai and coconut-based Coco-Lada, a blend of Darjeeling, lemon, and strawberry called Pink & Black, and the Naked Arnold which combines English Breakfast tea and lemon zest. There are no artificial flavors and the mixers are sweetened with agave or stevia. They can be mixed with spirits including vodka, tequila, rum, or gin, or consumed on their own for mocktails.
Teaologist founder Jennie Ripps and co-owner Maria Littlefield both come from the marketing world. The cocktails evolved from drinks they made to serve at events they were producing. The tea cocktails made their debut at the NYC premiere of “Twilight: Breaking Dawn” and the response was immediate. The drinks were being requested by restaurants and nightclubs and for other events.
Ripps and Littlefield felt that there was a need for a lighter, healthier mixer and saw an opportunity to create new blends and flavor profiles designed specifically to pair with spirits. While Ripps and Littlefield believe that Owl’s Brew will be fun for people to use at home, they are also finding that many mixologists in restaurants and bars are coming up with creative uses for Owl’s Brew as an ingredient in cocktail creations.
Don’t worry if cocktail recipes don’t come naturally to you. The Owl’s Brew team supplies you with ideas on the bottles and more recipes will soon be available on their website.
Interested in giving Owl’s Brew a try? It goes on sale this month through their website, www.theowlsbrew.com, and in a variety of retail, restaurant, and club locations primarily in NYC.
LINKED IN: Are we taking the tea-infused product concept too far? Should we be placing more emphasis on encouraging appreciation for specialty tea on its own or are these products bringing new audiences to tea?
TWEET: You finally have permission to act like a kid. Dunking cookies in tea is good. Thank you science.
We’ve all done it at one point or another — dipped an Oreo in milk, a piece of doughnut in a cup of coffee, a biscuit in a mug of tea. Now we can feel fully justified in doing so. (Well, maybe not the Oreos in milk, but that just makes sense.)
British chef Heston Blumenthal decided to find out if dunking a cookie in a warm drink really changed the flavor. Blumenthal is a food star in England with cookbooks, TV shows, and a highly-revered restaurant outside London that specializes in modernist cuisine. He used a device that was placed in his nostril to measure the impact of dunking and discovered that his treat actually did have more flavor once it was put into his hot black tea. Later work with food scientists from the University of Nottingham showed that once dipped in tea, not only was the biscuit more flavorful, but he experienced the taste faster. It all has to do with how we understand flavor.
Tastes (salty, sugary, bitter, sour, and umami) are experienced on the tongue but they are only part of the flavor story. Aromas, detected within the nose, are the other important piece. Remember as a kid when you didn’t like eating something and you’d hold your nose? There was science to that. You were restricting the aromas that reached your nose, reducing the flavor your body experienced. Dunking your cookie in your tea actually does the opposite. When it gets hot and wet, the volatile oils that we think of as aroma are released more readily so you get a stronger sense of flavor and it comes to you more quickly.
Here’s another curious fact. Some of the population may be “thermal tasters” for whom temperature maximizes the experience of bitter, astringent, and sour foods.
Now what does this mean for tea companies and shops? Maybe it just means that you should encourage people to play with their food. And tea biscuit and cookie producers? It’s time to promote the synergy between great tea and great food. And gaining a better understanding of how people experience the flavors of hot versus cold foods may influence your future tea blending choices, particularly when thinking about what might work for an iced tea versus a hot tea.
TWEET: Two sophisticated, quick-brewing, semi-automatic tea makers face off.
LAS VEGAS, Nev.
Calculating the number of tea lattes sold daily is a daunting task.
Millions upon millions and growing fast is my guess, based on conversations with Starbucks baristas and the management at Argo Tea.
Tea lattes (or more elegantly, tea cambrics*) are one of the top ten sellers in the category with chai the most requested. Virtually every offering is created from concentrate despite the fact Baristas and tea drinkers alike prefer the flavor of fresh-brewed. Until now there was no quick way to brew a double-concentrated loose-leaf that would stand up to steamed milk.
Picture Mr. and Mrs. Customer in the most popular coffee shop’s drive-thru line at 7:35 a.m. He orders a caramel double espresso latte and she orders a latte made with tea. Chaos ensues. A barista can brew the double and have it at the window in well under two minutes. The tea latte could easily take six minutes or more leading to incessant honking and late-to-work warnings for occupants of the 18 vehicles in line.
The Need for Speed
The Bkon® TX negative atmospheric brewer
Two new highly sophisticated, semi-automated brewers introduced last week at World Tea Expo are built for speed. The Bkon® TX brewer and Steampunk brewer each debuted to a fascinated crowd of serious tea entrepreneurs, some with retail aspirations to be the first in town to introduce tea latte at drive-thru. Selling for $9,000 and $15,000 respectively, these are not your typical tea pots.
The Bkon® TX brews tea in a negative-atmospheric (vacuum) chamber at variable temperatures between 160-210f, a process patented by Dean Vastardis. He and his brother Lou are co-founders, co-CEOs. Dean is the engineering and product lead and Lou is responsible for business development and marketing. Together they worked a deal with respected Swiss coffee equipment manufacturer FRANKE, a $2.5 billion company founded in 1911 with 10,500 employees in 70 countries. The firm provides exclusive manufacturing, distribution for the out-of-home market and global support.
Dean loves to tinker with equipment and by investigating how chefs speed-marinate proteins he came up with a way to convert an airtight food storage container with a tire valve and vacuum pump into a fast-brewing tea maker. Three years later his Reverse Atmospheric Infusion™ process gently coaxes the soluble elements, aromatics and natural sugars from tea. The technology applies to brewing coffee, infusing flavored spirits, it can be installed in vending machines, and used to make ready-to-drink beverages, said Lou Vastardis. “The reason we are here is to demonstrate a disruptive technology for the tea industry that allows every loose-leaf varietal to be delivered to consumers in a fast, consistent, and premium manner,” he said.
Vastardis describes the initial market for the equipment as foodservice. The infusion process is ideal for traditional teas and tisanes, herbals and fruit infusions. Operators can adjust temperature, time and the frequency and depth of vacuum, he explains. The Bkon® TX automatically pre-rinses and flushes the brew chamber to prevent cross-contamination. Dean brewed 16- to 20-ounce cups of tea in less than 90 seconds on the show floor and can brew 8- to 10-ounces in less than 60 seconds, yielding 90 to 110 cups per hour.
“The Bkon® TX allows an independent (or chain) to import, customize, and program over 90 tea recipes,” said Lou Vastardis. Independents would love to add a ‘specialty’ tea program if it allowed them to match the super-premium standards of their coffee program, he observes. “As you know, executing a tea beverage properly is much more complex than coffee,” he said. The Bkon TX provides independents a turn-key ability to introduce a specialty tea program that is equal or above the standard of their specialty coffee program, he said.
Due to the control of the atmospheric brewing perimeters by our software’s algorithms, independents can deliver any super premium tea with unmatched simplicity and consistency (across multiple locations), he explained. “It does not make a difference who is operating the equipment,” he said.
Attendees by the hundreds stopped to taste the results with Dean manning the machine and the FRANKE team fielding service and support questions. The consensus was favorable across a range of challenging teas and the price is comparable to an espresso machine, said Lou Vastardis. “Conservative ROI calculations project that an average independent shop should be able to recoup its investment in about six months,” he added. The Bkon® was named “Best New Product” at World Tea Expo.
Steampunk brewing chambers.
Siphon Strategy
Sam DuRegger is director of business development for Alpha Dominche, a coffee equipment maker in Salt Lake City, Utah. The name may sound foreign, but this two- and four-chamber siphon coffee and tea maker is American through and through. DuRegger said the company focus is creating technology to make world-class coffee and tea accessible to all.
The equipment was invented by Khristian Bombeck a coffee shop owner who founded the company. He built the first Steampunk in his garage, taking four years to perfect the design. The latest version, 4.0, is three feet wide by two feet deep and three feet high. It features orderly pipes and tubes and valves attached to an industrial boiler commanded by computers programmed to precisely and consistently make hot drinks from a wide range of coffee and tea recipes. Baristas can adjust agitation, water pressure and install three grades of metal filters to make up to 80 cups of coffee or tea per hour. The two-crucible model sells for $9,000 and the four-crucible model costs $15,000.
The Steampunk 4.0, four-crucible model.
In April Christa and Jeff Duggan installed the newest model at their Seventh Tea Bar in Costa Mesa, Calif.
It is the kind of shop that sells Feng Huang Gui Fei oolong, Bai Mu Dan for $3 and Bai Hao Yin Zhen for $4 a cup along with Ti Kuan Yin and Tung Ting. Gongfu service is available but siphon brewing is a hundred times faster.
The Steampunk has a coffee heritage and was named the “Best New Product” at the Specialty Coffee of Association of America show in 2012. This is the national debut, said DuRegger.
One big advantage is the ability to make quality coffee and tea simultaneously. Seventh Tea Bar resists that efficiency as the coffee aroma would kill the pleasure of scented teas but baristas serving tea latte don’t rely on gaiwans. There is a demand for treating light-roast Caribbean coffee with care and with expensive coffee, consistency is very important. DuRegger correctly identifies the variables that must be mastered in making pour-over. It only looks easy, we agree. The machine cannot make espresso. The Steampunk is calibrated to produce everything else from French Press style to pour over-style. It appears ideal for installation in coffee shops like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Peet’s Coffee & Tea or a Starbucks where large quantities of latte are served on the go.
“We believe that by transforming quality brewing into a streamlined, interactive process, we can bring quality coffee and tea to a larger audience than previously imaginable,” said DuRegger.
“We believe that the balanced marriage of function and aesthetics is the key to our designs,” he said, explaining that the name translates as “first of its kind.”
*Cambric — Buchanan’s Coffee Pub On the Hill in Boulder, Colo., advertises a $3.25 Cambric (Tea Latte) as does the Coffeebar in Truckee, Calif., where they sell a Medio Vanilla Earl Cambric for $3.50. At Terra at the Isabel Rose in a Montclair, N.J., a small Cambric Tea, described as a black tea, heavy on the organic soy/grass-fed milk and fair trade organic sugar, sells for $2.50. At Infusion Coffee & Tea in Philadelphia the Tea Cambric is described as loose-leaf tea, infused with steamed milk and honey. It is listed alongside the Mate Latte and Chai. At Russian-inspired Dazbog Coffee locations in Colorado, Texas and Wyoming the Hot Tea Cambric contains an estimated 140 calories per 16 ounces with 12 grams of carbs and 5 grams saturated fat.
