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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

I drink ridiculous amounts of English Breakfast tea with 1% milk every day. The water HAS to be boiling when it hits the tea. You cn really tell the difference if the water is less than boiling. Same but more subtle with green tea imo

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English teas are very much bred and selected for boiling water - this is definitely the right choice for them.

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

British teas tend to select blander batches of tea (said the retired British tea consultant who did a workshop at a tea festival years ago).

If you’re making Earl Grey, the bergamot is a lot of your cost per serving. A bold tea requires more bergamot for the same flavor balance. So bland tea, bergamot-forward flavor.

what does absolutely awful mean to you? i've made green and black tea in the same way and don't have a problem with either, but i've learned in my years that i'm much less averse to bitter than most people.

so is bitter what you mean by absolutely awful?

Do you actually drink not-bottom-of-the-barrel sencha? If not, your experience is not applicable, respectfully. With even middle-of-the-road sencha the difference is far from subtle.

I always thought Sencha was different to green tea, steamed leaves, more subtle?

"green tea" is an English term which essentializes Asamushi, Chumushi, and Fukamushi versions of Sencha, Gyokuro, Matcha, Bancha, Genmaicha, Hojicha, Kukicha, Shincha, Tamaryokucha, Kamairicha, Konacha, Mecha, Guricha, Hentaigama, Batabatacha, Wakocha, Karigane, Tencha, Aracha, Yanagi, not to mention the regional specializations.

Not to mention the many other varieties of green tea available outside of Japan!

Aside from matcha (powdered), konacha (powdered), hojicha (brown) and perhaps kukicha (twigs), most (all?) of the other ones are also just sencha, or loose-leaf green tea.

Shincha would just refer to freshly picked sencha, for one.

"Green tea" would be 緑茶 (ryokucha). Hojicha is not ryokucha nor green.

That is another way of needlessly essentializing the complexity.. though your distinction between matcha and sencha is not internally coherent with your own ontology.

Matcha and Sencha are the same plant, only differing in growing conditions and processing.

I didn't make this up; look it up in the dictionary or ask a native speaker.

Several of these words are talking about different aspects of tea. A shincha (fresh) gyokuro (variety+growing method) genmaicha (rice-puffs added; technically doesn't have to involve green tea) is still a sencha (plant+processing) and therefore a ryokucha (plant+color). Listing fukamushi as a "sencha type", but shincha as distinct from sencha, while calling houjicha "green tea" is incorrect and coupled with some quite obscure ones, you just seem to be dropping words without substance. It's like calling rose a "red wine".

(obv all of these words are the same plant species)

Just like with wine there can be no-end to nitpicking if you're looking for it but you don't need to know anything at all to appreciate it and find what you personally enjoy regardless of what snobs would tell you. You started it, though ;)

Sencha is a type of green tea

15% of people don't taste bitterness in the same way. Hops taste floral and a bit sweet to me and I like to chew on Artemisia species my family finds hideously bitter. I could put cheap gunpowder green tea in a percolator for an hour and it wouldn't taste bitter to me. Perhaps the gp has the same trait?

Maybe that's true, but arguing that putting boiling water on decent (i.e. not bancha or genmaicha or whatever) japanese green tea is a weird, minority opinion for a good reason. Also, gunpowder greens are not japanese.

I’m a bitter taster. There are some strains of loose leaf green tea that are my go to. One I confused with jasmine tea the first time I had it. Black tea is a vehicle for caffeine, as is coffee. Earl Grey is five kinds of bitter at once ans somehow gets a pass, but only in small quantities. English breakfast once in a while, but the rest is chai.

i suppose i'm in that 15%. i sometimes drink a tea made from a fresh hop cone to help me sleep. it's not so much that i don't taste bitter, just that i'm not averse to a lot of the flavors people call bitter (and there are a lot of flavors people call bitter.)

i don't know if it's related but i've also noticed i'm much more tolerant of ginger than most people and i can't taste cardamom (seed of the ginger plant, interestingly) at all.

hey, people are different.

Even most bottom-of-the-barrel sencha taste awful in boiling hot water, and this is vice versa; bottom-of-the-barrel black tea in not-boiling hot water tastes just as awful.

You're my spirit animal now. I drink massive amounts of strong black tea with milk and I agree, has to be absolutely boiling and I preheat the teapot.

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.

The article is about good Japanese teas. You're talking about black tea in bags.

I agree for black tea, but for green it becomes overly bitter if I use boiling water.

This also applies to mate and is very easy to do a comparison test with.

I've found it depends on the mate.

The current bag I have, Rosamonte brand, seems to require freshly boiled, right out of the kettle water to get a good extraction.

The last bag I had was bitter if you used just boiled water, you had to let it go down in temp a bit to get a good brew.

I should probably buy a bunch of mates and check the dates to see if that's a variable I've not accounted for. Usually I know how to deal with a bag of it after making the first drink.

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