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Comment by mhandley | Hacker News Reader

According to Twinings tea:

Always use freshly drawn (filtered if possible) cold water in the kettle. Tea loves oxygen as it helps the flavour develop.

Most of us are guilty of the following... looking at the kettle seeing there is some old, used water in there and simply re-boiling.

If you keep re-boiling the water in the kettle, it loses all of its oxygen and you’ll be left with a really flat cup of tea.

If you boil the kettle with fresh water, you’ll have a delicious cup of oxygenated tea that tastes divine.

https://twinings.co.uk/blogs/news/how-to-make-a-cup-of-tea-p...

I'm not sure how much difference this makes, but when I use the hot water boiler at work, the tea definitely tastes slightly off compared to using a kettle at home. But it's also possible the hot water boiler at work is not producing hot enough water.

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Honestly if it’s to put Twinings in it, it doesn’t really matter.

Any better tea to recommend? I'm used to Twinnings as the best I can find where I live, but I'm open to other brands if they're better.

Ahmad and Impra are both several cuts above Twinings, not expensive (especially as bulk loose-leaf) and can be found in standard grocery stores, or ordered online.

If you've a specialty tea shop nearby, that's all but certainly better, though it can be pricey.

You'll find there's a whole new world out there, and may regret discovering a taste for real whole-leaf teas.

Greens, whites, blacks, fermented, oolongs, darjeelings, matcha, gunpowder, pu'er, etc.

There are also herbal teas, such as rooibos, not made from sinchilla (tea plant), but also tasty.

Best is to buy a bag of loose tea from a tea shop. The leaves are whole, it's not powder. It's usually not hard to find, but they don't sell it at most supermarkets.

Are you American? In my non-double-blind experience, the crap that Twinings sells in the US seems different from what they sell elsewhere.

No I'm in western Europe. And I buy Twinings sometimes, it's not horrible, but it's not great tea either.

An Asian style water boiler maintains the temp just below boiling, so there isn’t any reboiling throughout the day. Think of it as a water boiling thermos.

You’re meant to replace the water daily. Not sure how many follow that guideline.

ETA: Only the so-called “hybrid” models have vacuum insulation. It’s worth the extra charge.

Warmer water loses dissolved gasses faster.

But as it cools the gasses reintegrate. So I'm not sure the science backs this up. Water at the same temp should have the same amount of dissolved gas regardless of how it got to that temp (given enough time for the gas to reintegrate).

I think you're incorrectly discounting that time aspect. If you leave a glass of tap water sitting out, eventually there will be a bunch of bubbles clinging to the sides of the glass. This doesn't happen immediately, but rather over many hours. Similarly, I would think that boiling water won't reach its gas equilibrium during the course of making tea, but hot water sitting around waiting to be used will.

I agree with this. I develop my own film and the way I manage water is to boil it, put it into sealed bottles, and store those in the fridge. This avoids bubbles more readily than just using tap water (which is over 20C in the summer anyway, which is why I do the refrigeration thing). No, I don't have an aerator on my tap either. Obviously that introduces a lot of bubbles.

Unless you are bubbling air through the water, it's going to take a long time to get the dissolved gas back in.

It's true that boiling water reduces dissolved oxygen, but cooling water takes on dissolved oxygen.

So I don't think the science backs this up.

Nearly all tea advice is ideology and superstition, explicitly because most people like different things about tea. There cannot be a right answer for such a personal preference.

Make tea such that you enjoy it. Same as coffee.

Agreed. You can't beat good old Nescafe instant coffee. Starbucks just can't compare.

Hmm, I don’t seem to be able to go back and delete this comment.

>Nearly all tea advice is ideology and superstition, explicitly because most people like different things about tea.

That's BS. It's true: people do have different tastes and preferences, so opinions are just that. But it's not "superstition": different brands/blends of tea really do taste different, many times remarkably so. It's just like a McDonald's burger vs. a burger from a high-end restaurant. One of course isn't objectively better than the other (from a taste standpoint; I'm ignoring nutrition here), since it's a matter of opinion, but you will find that significant groups of people who like a particular food enough to have tried different varieties will usually form similar opinions, or at least sort themselves into different camps.

"Superstition" implies that the differences people taste are not real, and this is quite simply false. The differences are real; it's up to you which one you like better. More expensive doesn't always mean better-tasting.

Boiling-hot water is going to have relatively little dissolved oxygen regardless.

If you're dead-set on "reoxygenating" your boiling-hot water, pour it from a slight height such that air bubbles form and re-aerate the water.

<https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-solubility-water-d_63...>

They do make such a thing as an instant hot water dispenser, though they are considered a luxury and not very common:

https://insinkerator.emerson.com/en-us/shop/insinkerator/ins...

These use a tank to keep a few cups of water hot at all times. The instant part is the delivery of it, not the heating. So this does not satisfy the Twinings comment you are replying to.

It does, because the water is aerated as it comes out of the faucet.

it doesn't. the faucet of these types of tanks is just a pipe opening and has laminar flow. it doesn't exit the normal sink faucet (which will have an aerator).

Just put it in the blender for a while.

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