5 Common Tea Brewing Mistakes

Haiti has this is done from a leaf in this video five common tea brewing mistakes in this video I'm going to be running through and demonstrating the most common ways that some of you out there are messing up brewing your tea this video is going to go under the basic tea education is playlist if any point in time you enjoyed this video then make sure you hit it with the thumbs up the more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way and if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel then go click that button but those of you who are just dipping your toes into the world of true tea brewing may seem a relatively simple process you take hot water pour it over leaf and make an extraction for those seasoned gold food tea heads out there however you know that tea brewing is a lifetime of learning and experimentation and a lot of the information in this video you will know already but we've always got to remember that people who are joining us on our tea journey and you may know some that you want to share this video with before we begin I realize that everybody likes their tea differently and everybody will bruise slightly differently but their 5 mistakes that I'm going to talk about today would send a shiver up any self-respecting tea lovers spine so let's begin and of course I'm not going to dwell too much about it but we are gonna begin with the tea bag I've done videos about tea bags before I've done a video where I've tasted a tea bag against a loose leaf tea I've also done a video where I've got my niece's to taste test between loose tea and a tea bag I'm not going to go too deep into this suffice it to say tea bags are the most common mistake committed by people out there quickly run through why I don't like tea bags first of all it's powder which means it's got a large surface area and that means it extracts it very very quickly and extracts everything from the leaf including all of those bitter and astringent notes that you want to control in the brewing process second reason is it's inevitably going to be lower quality tea because it's commodity tea it has to be produced in large quantities they're not going to be using saying fine fine pickings in the perfect temper as you get with hole or loose leaf tea also it'll be machine picked you're not going to get the same fine picking as you do with loose leaf tea so the tea bag and I want to quickly demonstrate one of the myths about tea bags and that is that it brews quicker that it's more convenient than loose leaf tea let me quickly show you I've got my my my mr. teabag head mark here this mug was given to me as a joke as you can imagine and I've got my golf ooh conocerte bra put links to these products to this product in the description below so I've got black tea same amount three grams in here goes into the interview mug and 3 grams goes in to the conocerte brewers so one of the most common misconceptions about loose leaf tea is that it's not as convenient as teabags let's dispel that myth right now so water goes in to the mug classic teabag wow it's been a long time since I've done this and what it goes in to my connoisseur tea brewer for those of you gone through heads that are saying that I'm not raising my tea we're going to simplify the process just for this for this demonstration so now normally you would leave the teabag in for well depends on your recommendations but about 30 seconds or so something like that so now I'm in a situation where I am ready to drink my tea so I'm ready the teabag is probably ready at the same time I now have to deal with this which I don't know what I'm gonna do with but I'll stick it here right so I hope that that has dispelled the myth that teabags are more convenient than loosely all you need are the right utensils for loose-leaf and you can brew just as conveniently and it's a much much better rooo I will taste this as a sushi licker dark chocolate a little bit of red fruits in it I will taste this very quickly flat dusty not very nice at all and brewed in exactly the same amount of time all right so there you go that's the first common mistake made by tea drinkers out there the second one I'm going to bring out the gong from guru second one is the amount of leaf so second common mistake made when tea brewing is using smaller amounts of leaf so let me quickly demonstrate again I've done videos about gongfu brewing versus Western brewing but it is worth recapping this is the amount of leaf which is recommended for ball roll who longs for western-style brewing this is the amount of leaf for gongfu star brew so this is one gram of tieguanyin versus six grams of tieguanyin so I'm gonna put these two in here so clearly the amount of leaf is very very different and I'm not just saying this because I'm a tea seller and I want to sell tea but you will get so much more pleasure and joy out of tea if you brew it with a larger amount of leaf and over multiple infusions that we'll talk about that later very very important if you brew with a small amount of leaf then there is no way that you're going to be able to extract the richness of flavor that you will get from larger gongfu style brewing now you don't have to go through go through you can go anywhere in between that's up to you but the more leaf you use the rich of the brew and you cannot substitute that with time so you can't just reduce the amount and extend the brewing time and to demonstrate that I'm gonna quickly do this now I'm gonna fill this up here and I'm gonna start a stopwatch and I'm gonna start the stopwatch and I'm going to brewing this for 120 seconds those two minutes now this is 6 sadly so I'm going to reduce the time by a six so that's going to be 20 seconds so when this is nearly finished I will then fill this one up and it's going to be 20 seconds and we're gonna taste the difference and we're gonna look at the difference in color some glass going to our base here and again I've done videos about this before but I just want to quickly run through it smaller amount of leaf you will never ever match the same richness body texture and effects of tea compared to when you brew with a larger amount of leaf and as I said you can choose at what stage you can go from slightly kind of halfway between gongfu and Western or you can go full gongfu style up to you but the more leaf you use the better your tea will be within reason we're coming up to two minutes now so I'm gonna extract this liqueur into the Gondar Bay and then immediately put this aside replace it with this pot here so this is the gongfu one again and we're going to be brewing this for 20 seconds here you go I don't need to start a stopwatch on this 20 seconds it is a relatively fast so we're gonna bring this up here and we're going to see the difference in color but more importantly the difference in taste and texture very very important so here we go this was about 20 seconds right so what we wanted to try to achieve here is a relatively similar extraction I know brewing is not linear but you know it's as best as you can do so six times the amount of leaf therefore 1/6 of the time you can see here the difference in color let me see if I can bring that a bit closer to you here we go so this is the one brewed for six times as long compared to this one I can clearly see a difference in the color and the texture you can see so much more activity going on in this one here there's a lot more body and looks thicker so we're gonna move these out the way quickly grab ourselves a couple of cups and we're gonna taste so Western versus gone through brutal so the difference is here is the amount of leaf and therefore we have obviously changed the brewing time to match that here we go let's go Western first Cheers tieguanyin should be creamy bursting with floral fragrance this is flat it tastes like you get when you are served and kind of tea at a cafe or restaurant that don't really know what they're doing it looks the part it has a nice aroma or that I'm picking up aroma from this one as well but it just doesn't have the texture or flavor let's go with the gongfu style completely different thick texture rich rich flavor persistence of friends when I breathe out through my nose right now the aroma is intense and continuous it has more texture more body it leaves more of a sensation I'm getting a slight Tang on the sides of my tongue this is like colored water with a little bit of fragrance this is like drinking the 15th or 17th infusion of a tieguanyin not the first and it really is the kind of tea that you get served so often by cafes that want to do the right thing they want to to serve good quality tea but they're not getting the leaf to water ratio right as I said don't have to go flow you don't have to go full gongfu but increasing the amount of leaf is fundamental to the tea drinking experience delicious so that's your second most common mistake when brewing tea let me clear up and we'll on to the third the third mistake which is commonly made when brewing tea is symbolized here and that is leaving the tea leaves in the water this one really winds me up especially when you go to a restaurant and you order a nice tea Chinese restaurants are not exempt in this and they produce a teapot and there's no way of removing the tea leaves the tea leaves are just floating around in the water they might be doing this just so they can get away with using less leaf and extracting it for a very long period of time which as we've just seen doesn't work but probably it's more that they don't appreciate the fact that tea leaves left in water will stew and that stewing process again will extract notes that you don't want in the tea it'll it'll give you this kind of oxidized dusty dry taste and texture so if you go to a cafe or restaurant that's serious about their tea and they serve you tea like this you may want to have a quick word and certainly you're purchasing any tea where these all-in-one Brewers like this you want to be looking for a removable filter that allows you to take the leaves out save them for more in future --nz and lock the tea liquor in the perfect state for you the perfect strength and texture now for those of you who are crying out what about grandpa start brewing I realize that grandpa start brewing does leave the leaves in the water but it's a very particular style of brewing I've done videos about this I'll put a link in the description below and it really is reserved for very particular teas that are suited in my opinion to grandpa style which tend to be lighter more kind of white colored green teas but that's a whole other discussion for the vast majority of teas out there you do not want to be leaving your tea leaves stewing in the water the fourth most common mistake when brewing a tea is choosing the wrong temperature water again I have done videos about this before and you seasoned gongfu tea heads know this already but it's worth reiterating if the amount of leaf effects the richness of the brew the amount of time that you brew for affects how much of the extraction happens the temperature affects which compounds are extracted the balance in the liqueur so to demonstrate that I've got 99 degree water here so 210 Fahrenheit this is beautiful Bud yellow tea and now I'm gonna add a little splash of some cold water to this kettle we're going to bring it down to 80 degrees it always amazes me how much water you need to add the boiling water in order to bring it down so that's 82 degrees that should prove the point we're gonna add that water here and we're gonna let them steep so the equalization is a fundamental thing because young tea leaves and buds that specifically young tea leaves are very high in catechins and catechins will extract very very quickly in very very hot water but as you lower the temperature of the water they will extract more slowly and catechins whilst being very good for you very healthy also can be quite bitter and so you want to extract enough to give your tea a little bit of strength and a bit of bite but you don't want to extract too much that it becomes unpleasant to drink so you've got to be very very careful especially with green teas especially with dark colored green teas again i've done a video about this before i put a link in the description below and i'll also put a link to our brewing guide in the description below so that you can download that print it off and you can see all the different temperatures we recommend as a starting point for the majority of your teas out there okay so I'm gonna remove the filter as we talked about in the last point always make sure you can remove the leaves so we've locked in this through now this brew is exactly as we'd intended albeit with water that's probably a bit too hot I'll let that brewed a little bit longer for all those people on the stopwatch who are checking how long it took me to to cool down that water it's probably a little bit longer than that and we'll see a difference I can already see a difference in the color and the cloudiness so when you're brewing with boiling water it's gonna extract everything very very quickly I like to imagine it like a kind of sprint race versus a long-distance race this all of the different compounds are going to reach the finish line at around the same time whereas in cooler brewing and you can either even go down to cold brewing or iced brewing you are basically slowing it down it becomes like a long distance or medium distance race where the compounds get separated out a little bit more so you can choose when you want to stop the brew and which elements have crossed the line into the liquor let's take a look at the color difference I'm gonna bring this one here too so again I can see that this one here is a little bit lighter a little bit brighter they both have good texture in them let's see what they're like when we taste them so 99 degree water versus 82 degree water Celsius cheers everybody nice at the start and then you get hit with this kind of very very intense bitterness and one of the things that I always find really disconcerting when people are buying mainly tees I always have to tell them please brew it with cooler water if it's a if it's a dark green tea because I hate the idea that they're going to go home they're going to hit it with like boiling water and then they're gonna not appreciate the flavor because even though the aromas are really nice the initial flavor is nice there's definitely a quite bracing bitterness that comes right at the end let's go with the 82 degree water soft smooth tiny bit of bitterness but that bitterness transforms to a good sweetness very very different if you were served these two teas I guarantee that 99.9% of the population out there would say that this was a much better teeth than this one and the only difference that we made was about 17 degrees in temperature Celsius so that's your fourth most common tea brewing mistake brewing at the wrong temperature the final common mistake made when brewing tea is not taking advantage of multiple infusions you should really infuse your tea leaves many times I get up put a guide link in the description below so you can read our guide giving you our suggestions on maximum number of good infusions you can get out of most tea types and this is not just about eking out as much value from the tea leaves as possible it is partly that but it really is also about firstly judging the quality of the tea so you can make really good judgements on the quality of the tea by how long it lasts how many infusions it gives you but also experiencing and appreciating the flavor difference between the infusions I like to equate it to how a bottle of wine changes after you open it it's the same with tea as the water creeps into those leaves it'll start to extract slightly different compounds and you'll get different flavor notes that balance will change so what I've done here is I've brewed eight infusions of Empress or da Hong Pao which is a beautiful we walk along from Fujian province this is infusion one two three four five six seven eight so you can see that the color does lighten and now we're going to taste our way through and see what we think so the first infusion strong has a nice fruity note to it mmm really refreshing really bright fruity note to it second right so here the roast is less apparent in this so the first infusion the roast because this is a roast to do long the roast is more apparent but here the fruitiness actually comes out a little bit more so if you were to ask me which is my favorite infusion they're both delicious I would say this is a bit more caramel and a little bit more roasted but this one the fruits and the freshness really comes out comes to the fore and a lot of people think the second or third infusion of any teeth generally are kind of the prized infusions here I'm getting mmm interesting more minerality so the fruit has died down a little bit getting more minerality which is nice giving me a little bit of a dry too juicy sensation on the back of my throat again these two are quite similar quite mineral-rich now it's getting lighter but with the lightness there's a real delight when you start to get through the later infusions of a tea some of the kind of top notes died away some of the most prominent kind of the lead roles in the tea die away become less apparent the volume has died down and what you're left with is is is a different notes that weren't allowed to shine with the first few infusions I'm gonna skip to infusion number eight infusion of eight is still going it still got minerality and that says to me that this these tea leaves have good strength that they've been good step well good soil so it's a really nice way to judge the quality and experience how the flavor changes as the balance of the compounds that are extracted changes this is a really nice thing to do by the way when assessing tea so if we're assessing teas that will brew up eight or maybe more but usually eight is enough infusions in bowls like this so that we can taste our way through that gives us a sense of how the flavor is evolving and the standard of the temple are in which the tea was grown so that was your fifth and final commonly made mistake when brewing tea let's recap quickly if you want to avoid all those mistakes first of all stay away from those tea bags second of all increase the amount of leaf you use just keep edging it up until you find the right balance for you third is please do not leave leaves in the water to sue unless you are intentionally brewing grandpa's style the fourth is making sure that you brew with the right temperature again the guide will be down below so you can check that out but but really focus on those green teas make sure that you brew it at the right temperature to get the right balance of flavors and the fifth is make sure if you're spending your hard-earned cash on good quality leaves that you do multiple infusions and enjoy the whole experience that's its he heads if you made it to the end of this video then make sure you hit it with a thumbs up check out our youtube playlists and let us know if there any videos you would like us to make if you're a brony London encompasses have some Camden to say hi and taste our wares if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over other than that I'm done from Bailey thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from those tea bags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye you

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 93,940

Keywords: tea, mei leaf, don mei, loose leaf tea, white tea, green tea, yellow tea, oolong tea, matcha tea, black tea, puerh tea, puer tea, pu erh tea, tea tasting, tea ware, gong fu tea, gong fu brewing, brewing tea mistakes, how to brew tea properly, how to brew whit tea, how to brew green tea, how to brew black tea, how to brew oolong tea, how to brew puerh tea, how to brew pu er tea, stewing tea, tea brewing instructions, what temperature tea, how to brew post fermented tea

Id: wKL6pBF0XZc

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2018