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?
2 responses to “Friday Roundtable: Water, water everywhere”
Here’s what I know:
– at boiling, all dissolved O2 is gone, as the water cools, it dissolves back into the water
– there is no proof that a higher amount of dissolved O2 is beneficial to taste
– Tocklai suggests that “over boiling” water “reduced the acidity of water by gradually driving out CO2.
– too many or too little minerals will affect taste and many cafes will filter everything out of the water and add beneficial minerals back in (Calcium, Potassium, Sodium, etc).
I am fortunate to live in Hawaii with an abundance of rainfall (120″ or more a year). We catch this water from our roof and store it in a coated cement cistern. Our water is then sediment filtered and ran through an ultra violate filter. Finally it is filtered with reverse osmosis and used for drinking and brewing tea. In my opinion it is wonderful. A clean pure water with no harsh tastes. When I brew tea in other places it’s not the same. It seems to me the true essence of the leaf comes forth with purified rain forest water. This tropical rain is also the source of hydration for our wonderful tea garden.