Oxidation makes tea black

The term black tea is ambiguous because it refers to different things depending on where you are/who you are talking to. In the west, black tea generally refers to a fully oxidized (autolysis) red tea that has not been fermented. However, in other parts of the world black tea refers to fermented puerh. How the puerh is fermented depends on whether it is wet or dry processed (shu vs sheng) but fermentation is an important part of both processes.

Let me introduce you to "kashmiri pink tea".

This is your regular Darjeeling tea or whatever dried tea leaves which are boiled with baking soda for " hours" to process them.

The result is a pink color that is consumed with salt. No sugar here.

People are pretty much addicts of this.

That'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).

I 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.

You sure on the oxalic acid aspect? I could see it maybe for bugs, but I figured the crystals would be too tiny. Oxalic acid causes kidney problems in larger organisms because it is hard to process. I suppose its crystal formation and poor solubility are linked here.

I actually prefer green tea and would urge you to try some "good" ones instead of the Lidl one :)

The difference is huge if you have a high quality green tea. Also make sure to use the right temperature to infuse. I would never go higher than 80°C and for some teas I only us 70°C. This is the most important thing a lot of people do wrong. Hotter water destroys the flavor and makes the tea bitter. Also very short steeping times from 1m to 1,5m are the norm.

Another thing noteworthy is that you can actually use a portion of green tea for 2-3 times depending on the quality (on the same day).

> 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.

pfft.... what do the Chinese know about tea? ;)

Traditionally 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.

White tea is oxidized naturally for a while. The article is referring to freshly picked leaves.

May 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.

It's going to be even better with the new plaza on Antioch.

ditto, one of the best stores i know of

A while back I looked at a few chemistry papers on measuring caffeine content in a variety of tea leaves, in the hopes of finding some low-caffeine green/oolong I could drink late at night. The impression I got was that there is so much variation batch to batch or year to year (not to mention preparation) that it largely swamps any attempt to say 'Darjeeling has less caffeine than Gunpowder Green'. There may be average differences but it's not too useful to know. Whether Red or Green, that tea could still easily be one that will keep you up if you drink it at 10PM. Ah well. (And decaffeinated teas are uniformly garbage-tasting, so that's no, ahem, solution.)

I 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).

We really shouldn't be judging caffeine content by color.

Certain tea varietals like Assamica have more caffeine than others.

Black teas are seen as high caffeine because they use Assamica varietals more than other types of tea.

Processing tea does remove caffeine. However I wouldn't be surprised if it also removed some of the neurochemicals that modulate caffeines effects.

So your results may vary.

My suspicion here is that black tea, especially when prepared in the British style, has more caffeine per cup because it's brewed to be much stronger than green teas typically are. So both can be true, black tea typically has more caffeine per cup, but black tea leaves have less caffeine than green tea leaves when compared by weight or volume.

Red 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

Generalizations like this are always dicey, especially when the statements are so imprecise. Is he talking about green tea vs black tea leafs, or prepared green vs black tea? When he says green tea, what variety?

Higher 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.

“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-lem...

It'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.

Puerh 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/

It's pretty easy to spot mold in your pu'er whether it's shu or sheng. I wouldn't worry about it.

Tulsi, 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.