3 Must-Know Tips for Flawless Tea Infusion: How to Brew the Perfect Cup | Tea Masterclass Ch.5

what's up t-cats dylan here from woo mountain tea coming at you with chapter five of the master class on t where we are talking about how to make the best cup of tea possible and avoid making the worst cup of tea possible with the tea leaves and the tea equipment you got in front of you whether you're making tea for yourself or your neighbor bill or your ex-wife tammy you got to know how to make the best cup of tea possible the thing is so much of what makes a good cup of tea at the end of the day comes down to what you do as the preparer of tea the tea producer the tea master can do so much to make you a really high grade tea leaf but you need to know what to do next with those tea leaves i'm gonna give you the one sentence summary of chapter five the tools we have to control tea leaf flavor extraction mainly include water temperature infusion time and leaf water ratio which we utilize carefully with less oxidized tea types lower quality teas or sit and soak infusion styles in order to avoid an overly astringent cup of tea and an unpalatable tcaa ratio so now let's boil down the sentence infuse and extract out the critical details and then just fling you out of this video with a crystal clear understanding of tea infusion and extraction for maximal flavor quality [Music] so so so [Music] [Music] the primary objective and what i would hope to encourage you to have is your primary objective with preparing tea is to make the most well-balanced well-rounded but still flavorful cup of tea that you can we want rich flavor and good balance we need good proportions good proportions of what might be the next question so the main things that we're extracting out of the tea leaves into the water are those three compounds that i laid out and explained in chapter two actually when we're talking about biology of t so we got polyphenols mainly catechins that's the main subset of polyphenols we're looking at in tea we got l-theanine which is the main subset of free amino acids and then we have caffeine if you want a quick refresher on these molecules their functions how they're made in tea what they taste like etc go back check out chapter two but we will be referencing these three classes of compounds a lot throughout this whole video but the point is that we need these various flavorful compounds in good relative proportion to one another good relative proportion but we also want a lot of them right so good balance well-rounded but also high volume we want that tea to be loud to help us accomplish this goal we have three main tools of tea infusion at our disposal at all times we got water temperature we have infusion time and we have a leaf to water ratio so these are our three tools of infusion where it doesn't matter what tea you got in front of you where it came from where you bought it what t-type it is doesn't matter these three tools can still be applied to then optimize for flavor quality okay so tool number one we have water temperature what are how hot or cold is the water this is our first critical critical tool now here's the deal with water temperature you're probably thinking what's the deal with water temperature well here's the deal when you're letting tea leaves soak in water at 100 degrees celsius and by the way i'm going to use celsius throughout this whole video because i am most familiar in celsius all the science that i read and all the science i conduct is done in celsius it's a better system and it's easier for celsius and water temperature for tea it's so simple because it's zero to a hundred so i almost can just think about it in percentage-wise like what what percent boil does it is it 90 boiled that's 90 celsius 80 boiled that's 80 celsius so i'm using celsius but i will add the fahrenheit equivalents somewhere around here back to water temperature if you are letting your tea leaves soak in 100 celsius water so boiling hot that is favoring the extraction of tea catechins and caffeine so those two classes of compounds are preferentially extracted at hotter temperatures it's it's a it's a direct line the hotter the water the more extraction of those two types of compounds that you get from the tea leaves pretty simple there however theanine l-theanine that primary free amino acid in tea that extracts optimally at 80 celsius a refresher from chapter two will be that the polyphenols the catechins they are a little bit bitter but mostly they're astringent they provide the astringency to the brew caffeine they're bitter it's not like a super unpalatable bitter caffeine in the right quantity is good actually caffeine is usually not the problem not the thing we got to worry about it's the polyphenols the catechins because with too much of these the tea gets way too astringent and it is basically undrinkable with two high concentration of catechins now we're going to come back to catechins in a second i'm just saying for now catechins are very astringent now free amino acids that extract fast to 80 celsius those are what creates these sweet and savory umami sensations of tea and we need those free amino acids to counter balance the astringency brought by the catechins and create this well-balanced well-rounded cup of tea a good cup of tea it has catechins it has that tannic structure it has a crisp kind of bite to it right it is a bitter leaf you can't avoid the astringency and you don't want to it wouldn't be the same tea with zero astringency we need some catechins but we can't let the catechins run the show all right we gotta we gotta we gotta reign them in and we do that with the free amino acids they create that counterbalance to it so with a good well-rounded cup of tea you got savory and sweet and you have the crisp tannic structure now these are infusing optimally maximally at different temperatures right so now you can already start to see how water temperature is going to affect the proportions of these flavorful compounds is going to affect the final flavor profile of your cup of tea put a pin in that concept for just a second i want to lay out the tools first and then we're going to come back and explain kind of more of the significance of the tools and how to apply them differently yeah tool number two is time okay time of infusion how long are you letting your leaves soak i let this one soak for um maybe 10 minutes which is kind of absurd but i'm filming a video and i forgot about it so sorry time of infusion is critical here's why imagine this imagine this you have a cup you toss your tea leaves in there and you add hot water called 90 celsius now within the first three minutes of the tea leaves soaking and sitting in that hot water almost all of the free amino acids will have been extracted out of the tea leaves and be in solution in the water ready to go down the hatch and provide your mouth with a sweet and savory delicious sensation so that's three minutes in caffeine is comparable to free amino acids a little bit later caffeine is more like on the order of four minutes okay but by minute for the vast majority maybe 90 of all the free amino acids and caffeine and the tea leaves are already extracted out into the soup however catechins are totally different those extract over a much longer time frame so imagine our cup of tea with our leaves soaking in there at minute four of soaking the balance of flavorful compounds in the cup of tea is gonna look something like this right you have a relative balance a well-rounded proportion of amino acids caffeine and polyphenols so that's minute four now we fast forward to minute 15. all right so now it's 15 minutes at 90 celsius like i said the amino acids and the caffeine have already basically come all the way out in that first four minutes but the catechins they just keep pouring out of the tea leaves they keep dumping into the tea soup if we look at our little pie chart here of flavor balance 15 minutes later the relative proportion of tea catechins has started to dominate the whole flavor profile of the tea the balance of flavor compounds has been skewed towards way too many catechins which as we mentioned is going to create a cup of tea that's way too astringent all right that's not going to taste good we want balance that's the deal with thyme is that the different flavor compounds extract maximally at different times so again let's put a pin in that we're going to come back to it i want to get to my third tool of tea infusion which is the leaf water ratio this one's relatively simple basically i view leaf water ratio as like a volume dial a higher leaf water ratio you're just turning up the volume you're making a louder cup of tea and the proportions would be about the same right the proportions of these various flavor compounds they stay consistent but you're just getting more of everything so if anything it's the proportion of tea compounds in general to water that's going up as you increase your leaf water ratio now you got your three tools of infusion water temperature infusion time why am i counting my fingers this way i don't know and then we have leaf water ratio three now let's talk about how we apply these under different circumstances and like i said in the beginning there's a couple things you might encounter along the road of your journey in tea that are red flags they're high risk situations for creating an overly astringent tea and now i'm going to introduce the technical concept for an overly astringent cup of tea i've already alluded to it a lot but the idea is this tea catechin to amino acid ratio this should already sound familiar at this point the catechins are astringent in nature they dry out the mouth tissue and create that like face shrinking mouth puckering like astringency of tea and free amino acids sweet umami they counteract astringency so the best most technically accurate way to describe this well-balanced flavor profile is the tc to aaa ratio so now we're going to be using that to describe this well-balanced tea flavor so now let's talk about these circumstances where you have the potential to encounter and create an excessively high tcaa ratio number one if you have a low grade tea if you haven't seen chapter four the last chapter i would recommend checking that out but i took a really high grade first flush organic green tea and compared it using a systemized procedure of tea quality assessment to compare it to a super low grade terrible tasting supermarket tea bag tea oh ah oh oh my god that was way worse than i thought it would be oh it tastes like bile acid it was bad i didn't like it i hated every second of it i don't want to think about it again but the point is if you have that low grade type of tea then you run a high risk of having too high a tcaa ratio that's actually the reason why the taste was so bad and why i responded that negatively to the taste when i tried it and so here's why low-grade teas have this high tcaa ratio the thing that differentiates high-grade teas from low-grade teas is actually not the catechin content right both high-grade and low-grade teas can have a super rich abundance of these t catechins but the big differentiator between low grade and high grade tea is the free amino acid content it's not the t category amino acid content so now you can see how these two different teas are going to have drastically different tcaa ratios right tc is constant but a a and one is super low in a and the other is super high now say you encounter a low grade t i mean step one don't buy the low grade t to begin with but like i said in the beginning i want to teach you how to infuse any of the tea that you got in front of you so say you got a low grade tea let's think about our three tools of tea infusion start with water temperature we do not want to bring that temperature above 80 celsius anything above 80 celsius is favoring catechin extraction over free amino acid extraction you know we want to absolutely make the most of these low-grade leaves right they don't have many amino acids in there but every little one that we got we want to extract and pull out into the water so 80 celsius you wouldn't want to go anything above 80 celsius all right what's another tool we got infusion time like i showed with our little pie chart right the more you go past three minutes the more the flavor profile is gonna skew towards a high tc low aaa ratio 80 celsius don't go above three minutes right and that might sound familiar because if you look at these teabag tees in the supermarket on the packaging of these things if you look at the steeping instructions it'll say infuse at 80 degrees celsius for three minutes that's like the common prescription for these lower grade tees why well now you know these companies have done their research they know that if the customers use a temperature above 80 celsius or a time or three minutes their tea is going to taste bad but on the contrary take a higher grade tea with these higher grade teas you're afforded the luxury of being able to use a bit higher water temperatures a bit longer steep times and extract more total flavor compounds out of the leaves into the soup and that is going to give you a cup of tea that is really rich and substantive with these flavor compounds but still maintains that good tcaa ratio you're getting a ton of flavor extraction but you're not sacrificing that well-roundedness that well-balanced cup of tea which is the pinnacle right that's the this is the holy grail of cups of tea you want a lot of extraction a lot of flavor but you don't want to skew your flavor profile towards astringency in the process that's the deal with low grade versus high grade teas again best option don't buy the low grade tea so let's get to our next high risk situation as we're along our journey and t here and this one is actually relative to t type right so we're not talking about t quality anymore we're talking about which of the six major t types is the t that you're infusing so you will recall i hope from chapter three i give you my catechin oxidation spiel there's the general spiel of t catechin oxidation catechins oxidized to the flavins oxidized to the root begins oxidized to the brownians all right the reason i had that spiel in chapter three was that this process is so important to t processing in general whether you're stopping the process of catechin oxidation through fixing or you're encouraging catechin oxidation through withering bruising and fermentation it's a huge underlying factor that affects the final flavor profiles of all the different t-types but importantly for this conversation with catechin oxidation you have catechins changing you're transforming they're either degrading or polymerizing or otherwise moving and transitioning into non-catechin compounds molecules so the more oxidized the catechins are the greater the degree of catechin oxidation of the t type the less catechins you have remaining in the tea leaves now how is that going to affect our tcaa ratio well a less oxidized tea has the potential to create a higher tcaa ratio than a t with no catechins which in such a t it would be pretty hard to create a high tcaa ratio because there's no tc let's give an example of the two extremes of the t-type spectrum we have green tea on one end where you'll remember from chapter three we do that fixing right up front and the whole goal of green tea processing is to preserve catechins and preserve these compounds that are abundant in the fresh tea leaf and preserve that crisp green freshness on the complete opposite end we have ripe puerte which is a super heavily post-fermented dark tea type by the time right puerto has done processing it's gone through this two-month post-fermentation process all of the catechins and right puerto have been already not only oxidized that the flavins and theorubigans such as the case of black tea but they've even gone further into creating these via brownins which are like the most oxidized the most transformed form of tea catechins so if you're looking at ripe puerto leaves there's essentially zero catechins to speak of so now we have the least oxidized and the most oxidized tea so now let's apply our three tools of tea infusion differently according to these different teas we'll start with the green tea so let's take our green tea and we'll put some in a glass if we're trying to prevent an excess tcaa ratio we want to be at 80 degrees celsius and infuse for not too much longer than three to four minutes so it's kind of the same concept as lower grade teas where we are being careful not to use boiling hot water for 10 minutes because there's tons of tea catechins in those less oxidized tea leaves and they will pour out into the tea infusion and it will create a tea which is not palatable can't be drinking that now on the flip side we have ripe poeric tea which like i said no catechins to speak of in these tea leaves so when i'm infusing ripe purity i am using boiling hot water essentially sometimes i'll let those puppies soak for 10 15 minutes i mean i do sick sick things to my right poor tea leaves i mean it's borderline criminal what i do to these tea leaves the way that i soak them for long periods of time in boiling hot water it's just obscene the point is when i do that when i have these crazy thick soupy ripe poo pooer extractions i drink it and it's still smooth still silky sweet smooth goes down easy i love every second of it in those cases you're getting tons of flavor extraction the amount of substances infused into the water there is super hot but that balance is still palatable right you don't have an excess amount of tea catechins in relation to t amino acids because there's no catechins in there anyway you have the extremes with green tea and right poor but you also have the other bunch of tea types that are in the middle somewhere and it depends oolong tea for example you have some oolongs that are very lightly oxidized which are almost green teas how lightly oxidized they are and then you have some oolongs which are almost black teas because of how heavily oxidized they are oolong is this huge hybrid category so you gotta look at the oolong how oxidized is it and you can tell basically based on color the greener oolongs are gonna be less oxidized the darker redder oolongs are gonna be more but with these intermediary t-types i generally say 90 celsius right my general shtick here is 80 celsius for green tea 100 celsius for ripe pooe or heavily post-fermented dark tea and then everything else 90. that's generally what i do and then obviously with the oolongs less oxidized push that thing closer to 80 and then with the more oxidized you can keep it around 90. in the downloadable pdf document that i'm making for this chapter and i do make one for every chapter so keep an eye out for that i will include a little figure and i'm sure i'll just show it to you right here now you have green tea all the way on the less oxidized you got ripe all the way on the end and then i'm going to just generally put water temperature according to degree of catechin oxidation so there's a little figure print it out maybe laminate it put it above your tea table tape it on the wall maybe print a few of them send them out to your friends hammer them up on the on the church door right do what you're gonna do but just keep this general guide of water temperature according to t-type in mind and you'll be doing fine just fine so last but not least we have our last and final potential high-risk situation that you might encounter along the path with t the example specifically that i'm thinking of is the tea tumblers the idea with the tea tumbler is that you're throwing your tea leaves in this water bottle essentially and you're taking it with you to go you're going on a road trip maybe you're going on a bike ride maybe you're going on a walk to the neighborhood right you want to go say hi to your friend bill down the street how's bill doing we don't even know so you got your tea tumbler you throw the leaves in there and the thing with these is that you don't get to pour the tea out of the tumbler like you do with a gaia wand or a teapot there are cases where you can use a tea tumbler as a teapot where if the screen's in there you'll let it soak and you'll pour it into other people's cups right that is a great way to use a tea tumbler actually but most of the time you're just taking it on the go and you're not pouring it into something else before you drink it you're just drinking it right out of the tumbler as if it's a water bottle so in this case scenario the infusion time is basically set constant so your control over that t tool of the infusion time is kind of taken off the table you can't stop the leaves mixing with the water they're just floating around and they're doing their thing now we have 20 30 minutes of infusion right that's that's a warning sign for excess tcaa ratio you want to be using lower water temperature and less leaves in such a circumstance and i have made this mistake more times than i can count where i'm going on a road trip i got a two hour drive ahead of me and i'm like all right i'm gonna be buzzing the whole way i'm gonna fill up a big whole thing of tea and i'm gonna put it in my little center console here and i'll be driving bumping my tunes drinking tea it'll be great but the thing that i forget is that my tea tumbler it protects heat really well it's kind of one of these heat keeping thermal tumblers when i pour my tea in there to start i use maybe five grams which is kind of a lot and i use like 90 celsius water now fast forward 30 minutes into my drive i go to take a sip and it's still like 88 degrees celsius it hasn't cooled off at all and it's easy to drink hot tea out of like a cup like this this is not a thermal heat keeping material here this is porcelain but in these tumblers the temperature of the tea is so hot still it's really hard you're moving you're behind the wheel right you're trying to drink this scorching hot tea and you can taste already that the tcaa ratio is way out of whack because the water was way too hot and the leaves have just been soaking in this 90 celsius water right and you can taste the flavor's getting out of proportion so you want to drink it faster so the infusion stops so you're drinking this boiling hot liquid and you're trying to do it fast and you're behind the wheel and you're scalding your mouth and the tea is spilling all over your shirt and you're swerving lanes you're hitting pedestrians save the pedestrians save your mouth save your shirt for crying out loud now the point of this absurd ridiculous story is that if you're using these tea tumblers when the tea leaves are soaking for that long of a time use a much lower water temperature and even less leaves than you think that you need if you use like 60 celsius water right like that's way too low for a normal gong fucha tea infusion if you're taking on the go and it's steeped in there for 30 minutes 60 celsius will slowly extract the flavor out it'll keep that tcaa ratio from getting way out of whack and it will actually be drinkable when you're driving and you won't be a risk to pedestrians and other drivers so safety first is the point and then t flavor quality second a close second you know yeah honestly that might be first safety could be second i don't know maybe they're tied okay safety and tea flavor quality are tied for first okay but they're both important those were the three tools of teen fusion and three high risk situations that you might encounter along the path of tea so now each time you come across one of these situations you know what to do you know how to use water temperature how to use infusion time and how to use leaf water ratio accordingly in each of those circumstances so now you have the tools to even improvise with new situations say you're camping and you have a solar powered tea kettle that only gets to 50 celsius or 60 celsius okay in that case you're going to use a lot of leaves and you're going to use a long infusion time you're going to soak those puppies for 20-30 minutes you're going to use a lot of leaf and you're going to get a great cup of tea in the woods let's do another one let's say it's the last gram or two grams in your tea bag you're almost out of tea you gotta go and re-up with more tea pretty soon in that case scenario right you have a low leaf water ratio then you're gonna soak those puppies and smoke in hot water for as long as possible right that's gonna you're gonna extract everything out of there because when the volume dial is that low then you don't need to be so fearful of that ratio getting out of whack because at the end of the day the flavor compound to water ratio is still so low that how astringent cannot really get now we're being versatile improvise adapt overcome is all i can say i want to conclude and close out chapter five with this final point and the point is about personal preference so the first thing is that any person's sensitivity to astringency to bitterness right to the five taste elements is different from person to person there's high inter-individual variability among our sensitivity and receptivity to these various five taste components i mean part of that's genetic these uh taste receptors are proteins and protein complexes anything that is protein based comes back down to genetics but it's also environmental where if you're drinking tea all the time or you're eating otherwise bitter or stringent things regularly you're gonna be acclimated and you might even start to like a certain degree of stringency and bitterness in your food and beverage so that means if you're like a seasoned veteran tea drinker and someone comes to your tea table who's a bit of a newcomer to tea they might not be as receptive to bitterness and astringency so when you're preparing tea for them maybe consider a little bit lower water temperature a little bit lower in fusion time contrarily they might be sick or sicker puppies than you are and they might love that astringency so just be receptive to how they're responding to the t be inquisitive say how is that and then kind of gauge their reactions and then change the next infusion based on how they responded right the point is that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to t infusion there's not they're simply not because people are different cultures are different teas are different right you have different qualities different tea types different this different that but if you have a good grasp of the three tools of tea infusion then it doesn't matter what the path of tea throws your way you're ready to rumble and prepare the best cup of tea and avoid a bad cup of tea with a way too high tcaa ratio and now you know all this information look at you get out there start experimenting for yourself see what you see see what you find see what you like see what you don't like and uh let me know how it goes come back here comment let me know how it went so that is it for chapter five in chapter six we are talking about tea consumption for human health this is going to be an insane chapter this is going to be lunacy we're going to be talking about neuroprotective effects of tea right the effects of tea on the brain talking about the effects of tea on the microbiome the effects of tea on weight loss or weight gain it's going to be a very nuanced conversation and we're going to keep it science focused and science based until the next video i want you to stay healthy i want you to stay positive and most importantly keep sipping tea one love [Music] you

Channel: Wu Mountain Tea

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Keywords: wulong tea, oolong tea, green tea, black tea, tea infusion, make tea, drink tea, how to make tea, tea infusion time, tea infusion temperature, matcha, macha, teapot, tea pot, tea tumbler, health effects of tea, benefits of tea, healthiest tea, dark tea, white tea, yellow tea, camellia sinensis, camelia sinensis, chinese tea, japanese tea, indian tea, ceylon tea, organic tea, tea flavor, savory, umami tea, oomami tea, bitter tea, astringency, tea astringency, sweet tea

Id: L_lhIDXjf4M

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022