Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

I am truly sorry but for anyone not drowning their tea in the alabaster ichor of the masses of Great Britain, 2g per 100ml of water is a bombastic amount of tea to brew and an infuriating statement to make from a standards body. whats even more ridiculous is that the 2/100 ratio is FREQUENTLY insisted upon by websites selling loose teas.

Try this experiment. meter out a 1 litre pot of water. now meter out 18-20 grams of loose green tea. what you brew (if you attempt it) will be flat-out undrinkable.

There has GOT to be something better than the ISO standard here.

EDIT:

I just tried to do this again with a green lower grade Xinyang Maojian and it tasted like the over-steeped dreck conjured up in an airport coffee chains platitude scrawled cardboard cups. the cup was rich, but the astringency was like trying to drink a cup of drywall. It was utterly wasteful for anything more than just testing and the comical amount of tea I used to attempt this left me with a sense of remorse. The tea I made sat tangibly heavy in my stomach.

It is a standard, and I guess I never stopped to consider what a standard means and thats what this standard does a particularly great job of doing. Yes, Starbucks adheres to this standard and if you buy a venti will gladly (sometimes reluctantly) give you four tea bags in the cup but for the love of god yank them out after a minute or two at most lest youre looking to start up your own tannery in the terminal. Its quite strange to think of a standard as something you shouldn't make a habit of.

It sounds like brewing tea in this way at home would be a misunderstanding of the standard:

> This standard is not meant to define the proper method for brewing tea intended for general consumption, but rather to document a tea brewing procedure where meaningful sensory comparisons can be made. An example of such a test would be a taste-test to establish which blend of teas to choose for a particular brand or basic label in order to maintain a consistent tasting brewed drink from harvest to harvest.

On the other hand, it's very strange to me that the type of tea is not specified. Pouring boiling water over anything other than black tea typically destroys the aroma completely, and green tea in particular turns bitter and extremely taninnous. Also, 6 minutes of infusion sounds extreme for green or oolong or white tea.

For green tea, the nicest taste I've gotten by far is from very short brews with medium temperature (~80C) water with large quantities of tea, drinking 2-4 infusions from the same leaves. I've never measured the quantity in grams, but after the tea expands, it would typically fill the brewing pot.

> For green tea, the nicest taste I've gotten by far is from very short brews with medium temperature (~80C) water with large quantities of tea, drinking 2-4 infusions from the same leaves.

The so-called gong fu method of preparation.

Yes, but didn't want to make it sound like "it's good because it has a Chinese name" or "it's good because it's traditional" - it's just a method that really seems to me to bring the best out of many teas: low astringency, 0 bitterness, wonderful floral or fruity aromas, usually lots of sweetness.

I’m gonna have to disagree here. The average coffee cup is 118ml and the average tea packet contains 1.5-2g of tea (from a quick google.) When I make morning tea I use a packet for 1 coffee cup of hot water, so that’s basically the standard. It is very drinkable, as I do it every morning. Any more water and it starts to taste like water as opposed to tea.

> The average coffee cup is 118ml

Average where? The most standard Ikea cup [1] that I can see in all the offices around here is 8oz, which is around 230ml. Personally, I drink coffee from that, but for tea, I always use some of the 10oz cups, which is more along the line of 300ml. A tea bag for 300ml is perfectly acceptable in my mind.

[1] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/faergrik-mug-stoneware-white-60...

In the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)#Coffee_cup

A coffee (espresso) cup is not a tea cup. I've lived both in and outside UK, and I've always seen a standard tea bag with a bigger 250 ml plus cup (imagine the ubiquitous red Nescafe one)

I've never seen anyone drink a teabag out of an espresso cup. You can, but it's non standard.

American coffee contains significantly more water than an espresso.

That cup cited is four ounces, an espresso is one ounce.

I apologize if this is too unsubstantive of a comment.

I primarily want to say how much I like the parent comment's writing. It is very evocative — "the tea sat tangibly in my stomach", eg, is the sort of description I'd expect in a well-written novel. Kudos nimbius.

Separately, I fully agree w/ the above point about a 2:100 ratio being well too much. The tea shop from which I buy generally recommends ~2g loose for a 175ml cup, but I still find this to be too strong at anything except a minimal brewing time. I tend to use about 1g/cup, ie a bit over 0.5% by weight.

Look into Chinese tea infusion methods in particular the gongfu tea ceremony[1]. They stuff a tiny clay teapot pretty much full of tea leaves and do several very short infusions. The first infusion is usually undrinkably bitter and thrown out. Everything after that tastes great though.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gongfu_tea_ceremony

I think the gongfu style preparation works great for whole leaf teas, but maybe not so well for Japanese or Indian teas. As far as I can tell, there's no one-size-fits-all method of brewing tea.

I brew in this style and the reason you toss out the first steeping sometimes is not because it’s overbrewed, but because some methods of leaf preparation require the leaf to hydrate and open up before you can get a decent brew. So the thrown out first brew is bland hot water. Teas that benefit from this are pu’er packaged into cakes and some oolongs rolled into balls and other tightly formed shapes

Interesting. I always thought it was because of various chemicals used on the tea; we always called it the "cleaning brew."

There definitely could be multiple reasons people would do this to their tea. I try to avoid teas prepared with chemicals.

You can't pick and chose which bits of the standard to apply!

> meter out a 1 litre pot of water. now meter out 18-20 grams of loose green tea. what you brew (if you attempt it) will be flat-out undrinkable.

You've ignored the maximum size of the pot.

> If a large pot is used, it should hold a maximum of 310 ml (±8 ml) and must weigh 200 g (±10 g).

> If a small pot is used, it should hold a maximum of 150 ml (±4 ml) and must weigh 118 g (±10 g).

Depends on the tea, but I use 4g/125ml water and steep around 10 seconds for the first infusion. If I were to attempt the same with the stuff they put in Lipton tea bags, it would match your description perfectly, but if you use quality teas from China, it’s a whole different experience.

There are 3 essential dimensions of steeped tea preparation: leaf quantity, water temperature, and steep time. 2g per 100mL isn’t outrageous at all and if it tastes strong, you need to reduce one or both of the other two parameters.

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