Will boiling water ruin green tea?

Depending on how sensitive you are everything can change the taste, but IMO the big three are:

- water (huge, huge differences)

- type of tea (cultivar, when/ where it was harvested, steam time)

- brew temp and time

I eventually settled on a system where I heat filtered water in a regular pot with a meat thermometer to the right temp (this is usually between 155-170F depending on the specific tea), pour over tea into a glass pot (through stainless steel basket), brew from 30-60 seconds (again depending on tea), serve. I also measure the water, and weigh the tea on a scale.

It might sound convoluted and compared with like, brewing a kettle and dumping over a bag it is. I mostly drink earl grey now, probably as a result. In the summers it's a lot easier, I just dump tea in a pitcher of water and put it in the fridge overnight.

Also, I wholeheartedly recommend o-cha.com for tea and peripherals.

190F(85C) requires more timing control and get out the tea after less than a minute, while lower temperatures are more forgiving.

[0] https://www.theteamakers.co.uk/blogs/news/japanese-tea-brewi...

The mugs were causing problems because they were only fired once? There is supertasting, and then there's this. I am glad I don't have these problems.

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?

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.

There surely must be other ways to get probably safe food than boiling everything you drink.

I cold brew green (and black) tea and drink multiple cups a day.

Most Japanese green teas are steamed past the harvest time – lightly (gyokuro), or more thoroughly (sencha), or anywhere in between depending on the grade – and some varieties can also be roasted (e.g. yabukita). Japanese green tea generally requires milder water temperatures for a preparation. Typically, the higher is the grade, the lower is the temperature, e.g. from 60ºC for gyokuro and high grade matcha to 80ºC for sencha. Gyokuro and matcha, prepared at the right or slightly lower temperature, has a lot umami flavour with a little bit of sweetness in it.

Varieties of the Chinese green tea is either lightly roasted (without being steamed nowadays) or lightly fermented. They need higher water temperatures, typically in a range between 80ºC and 90ºC. High grade Dragon Well prepared at the 80ºC temperature has a unique flavour that I don't know describe, but it will have almost no flavour is a lower temperature is used.

Enjoying tea is more to do with the individual, than the tea itself.

If you tell someone never to drink those lower grade teas you're doing them a disservice and that's the only situation in which the advice about never using boiling water would apply.

What I took from the article was that there appears to be a rule (I am imagining because I'm not a green tea expert) that green tea should never be prepared using boiling water when in fact, as the writer states, is false. As in "it depends".

And near the end of the article they state:

"However, you should prepare tea in the way that works best for you. If you want to boil your sencha because you want it to be very bitter and astringent, by all means go ahead."

I don't see any contradictions.

It's like coffee, different beans, different roasting of those beans, different grinding of those beans will mean there is no one true way to get the best extraction, and your preferred extraction might differ from another's extraction method.

At work I put a teabag in hot water and zap it in the microwave for 20-30s, key to driving out the flavor into the water.

I don't like green tea but I would think that you should experiment with whatever temp gives you the extraction you need. Don't listen to experts is rule #1 when it comes to brewing.

For most greens though (particularly the more fragile ones), oh heck no. They taste absolutely awful at high temperatures.

There no need to get massively invested.

This is how I learned to paint minis. All I did was buy some unpainted ones and drop by a friend’s place. He has all of the supplies and equipment. All of my unpainted minis are in his closet. :)

Edit: By having a friend, I mean if you have a friend who is into tea/coffee/wine/etc. I enjoy hanging out with people who have hobbies I wouldn’t pick up on my own.

Is it japanese green tea? Because that's what the article is about, if you're drinking black tea, or chinese teas, that is utterly irrelevant: they are different cultivars, selected and grown differently, with different harvesting and processing, and different brewing methods and temperatures.

You might well be Spiff and still have no useful input.

Try brewing yerba mate in front of an Argentinean/Paraguayam, using using a thermal bottle. Also, boil the water in an electric kettle and pour a bit of cold water on the bottle to bring back the temperature to 80°C

They'll go bananas on how mate isn't served like that, on how you ruined it, etc.

But you can do it like that just fine. And it can be perfectly brewed like that and the taste will be the same.

People just like treating their ceremonies like shaolin kung fu.

See, that's where the "no" is actually a "yes" for me. For my palate, bitter tea = ruined tea.

I found that I could tell the difference but for tea I regularly drink I couldn’t be bothered to break out a thermometer. But if it’s the good stuff I totally would be doing more of the ritual.

But boiling is a different process, especially with tea where even if the water is boiling when poured it will rapidly cool down below the boiling point. As the article explains, boiling water extracts different substances to different degrees than warm/hot water. Specifically it will extract more of the bitter-tasting compounds and can break down others.

“What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."