How to Brew Green Tea Properly

hati heads this is done from a leaf in this video how to brew green tea in this video I'm going to show you how to get the best out of your green tea this video is going to go under the basic tea education playlist if at any point in time you enjoy this video then please give the video 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 yet then go click that button ok this video comes as a direct response to a user called share the key on YouTube who wrote to us and asked us to make a video about how to brew green tea specifically how to get the right temperature water for green tea so this is an answer to you okay so first and foremost this video is going to go through a guideline to brewing green tea everybody's different everyone likes their tea brew differently that's perfectly fine but this is a good starting point for you so there are no hard and fast rules this is a good starting point for anybody who wants to brew green tea we've made a downloadable guide I'll put the link in the description below so you can download the guide and you can look at all T types but this is for green tea so the most important thing with any tea is get good leaf there's no point in you having a bad starting point this is function malfunction there's an expression which goes you can never make good tea from bad leaf but you can always make bad tea from good leaf and that shows you if you've starting with badly forget it you're not going to produce really high quality tea and even if you've got very good leaf you have to be careful in the way that you brew to make sure that you get the best out of it okay so the brewing process let's quickly just step back and look at the brewing process the brewing process is an extraction process okay in this leaf there are hundreds of compounds and all of them extract at different rates and differently so the art of brewing the reason why people spend a lot of time learning brewing and and experimenting with brewing is the art of being able to extract exactly the right balance of these compounds to get the right flavored tea for you now green tea is well known for having having very high levels of a compound called catechins catechins are antioxidants very high strength antioxidants that exist in high levels in green tea catechins are very good for you but they're also very bitter so we want to make sure when we're extracting green tea in other words when we're brewing to make sure that we extract the right level of catechins so that we don't have excessive bitterness so commonly people say to me I don't like green tea it's too bitter and usually the reason for that is because well either they've got bad tea or god forbid they're brewing from tea dust in teabags which extracts everything very quickly or they are extracting too strong probably using water that's too hot or brewing it for too long so in the brewing process you have three brewing decisions to make or three factors which affect the balance that ends up in your cup the first is the amount of leaf you're going to use to water right there are generally considered to be two schools of brewing the western style the more economical the more kind of affordable brewing star and then the Chinese style the only difference between them is the amount of leaf to water ratio so with Chinese star they're using a lot of leaf to a small amount of water whereas Western style they're using a smaller amount of leaf to a larger amount of water so western style for green tea you're looking at something around two grams per 300 ml of water for Chinese style brewing you're looking at something like 5 grams to 6 grams per 200 mil of water so quite a difference right now a lot of people say to me I don't know how to measure it because I don't want to pull out weighing scales after you brewed for a few brewed many times you start to just do things by eye a good kind of rule of thumb is a large a really large pinch something like this see if I can focus for you something like this is about one and a half to two grams so that would be sufficient for your 300 mil of water right so that's the amount of leaf let's talk brewing times western-style is around one and a half to two minutes Chinese style is around ten seconds something like that maybe even five seconds once the leaf has started opening up right so very different in terms of brewing time so we've spoken about leaf to water but ratio we've spoken about steeping time now let's talk about what share the key the user who wrote to us would like specifically to know about which is water temperature I think that a good starting water temperature for green tea is about 80 degrees if you brew with boiling hot water what will happen is it'll extract very quickly everything from the leaf including those catechins and you have less control of when you pour you have less control of reducing the amount of catechins in the actual tea that you're drinking now if you wanted to brew tea specifically for health only for health you didn't care about taste and you just wanted the healthiest brew you could then you would brew it hot and you would steep it for a long time and you would have a very strong bitter brew but we brewing for flavor here we want to enjoy our tea so we'll drink lots and lots of it right so we want to be able to control how much catechins that are in the final tea so we do that by controlling temperature so let's brew some tea first thing that I'm going to do is I've got some freshly boiled water here I'm just going to put some into each pot now the reason I do this is because what we want to do is bring the tea ware to a high temperature or to a temperature which is closer to our brewing temperature if we don't do that then when we pour water into a cold pot the glass absorbs all the the temperature the heat and we end up losing a lot of the heat so you don't get a nice brewing consistent brewing temperature right so let's take this leaf so as I said this is about five grams here this is a 200ml pot so you can see probably once I shake it down we're talking about a third of the way up the pot something like that which is always a good rule of thumb about a third let's do the same here so what we're going to do is we're going to be brewing with 80 degree water here and then we're going to be brewing with freshly boiled water so around 90 95 degree water and then we're going to see what the difference is I'm actually interested to do this I've never done this a B myself so this is quite interesting okay so how do you get 80 degree water well I've just got freshly bored water next to me what you can do is you can stop the kettle when the kettle is making a loud rumbling noise and you see a single column of steam rising from the spout that's around 80 degrees what you can also do is add a splash of cold water to the kettle around ten percent of the volume maybe a bit less five to ten percent just add a good splash of cold water and you will get the temperature down so let's try that so here is freshly boiled water I'm going to put about two hundred mil of water in here and I've got some cold water here and I'm just going to put a little splash of cold water about 20 mil something like that let's see I've got a temperature I've got a thermometer here which is not working come on here we go right so a little splash of water let's see what it's boarded up to you go you can see yourself so 82 degrees something like that 81.5 you can see how it's starting to drop right so that's our temperature so that's about right just check them in focus okay so I'm going to pour that one in here now normally I would rinse but I'm conscious of not making this video too long you don't really need to rinse with green tea is very suitable for alongs and pours you don't have to rinse with green teas it just means that the first steep is going to be a bit longer so this has been about seven seconds we're going to keep brewing we're going to do about twenty second brew here I'm going to intentionally brew a little bit harder just to make sure that we really taste the difference okay so conscious of making sure that the brewery time is about the same so I've got a little stopwatch here okay so that's about 20 seconds and we're going to pour this out subsequent infusions you don't have to brew as long because obviously the leaf has started opening up right just going to put the kettle back on and we're going to brew this one with boiling water now boiling water is a bit of a misnomer straight from the kettle is never going to be boiling water is going to be about 90 95 degrees something like that so there you go put that on start my stopwatch so we want to make sure that we get at the same brewing time so we can do a genuine like-for-like taste test and hopefully we're going to notice a difference so that's about there you can see brewing in glass is lovely because you can really see the leaf starts to react to the water right so here we go tea goes in right now what I'm going to do what I'm going to do is now pour into these tasting cups sorry smelling cups these are Roma cups because I really want to see if I can notice any difference in the actual aroma take this twist and turn take this one twist and turn okay so let's see if we can notice any difference in the smell Wow beautiful lovely light fragrant slightly flowery let's see if I notice the difference on the boiling water yep definite difference slightly got more of a stood know what I mean by stood is slightly older like as if you imagine wood that's soaked up water it's got that kind of slightly wood ear wetter if that makes any sense wetter aroma okay so now I'm going to pull the camera around and we're going to have a taste and you're going to see the difference in color of this tea okay so here we are we've got the two cups of green tea that I've just brewed and I hope you can see through the camera the difference in color so this one here is made with the boiling water this one here is made with the 80-degree water and you can immediately see that this is a lot darker has a slightly yellow slightly yellow a tint to it compared to this one which is very bright and more of a kind of slightly kind of light lime green yellow rather than this slightly duller yellow you can also see here if I can get them in focus let me see if I can get these in focus hold on one second right so this one here is made with the 80 degree water and this one here is with the boiling water so you can immediately see the difference that just 20 degree or even less because the boiling water is never boiling boiling so 10 to 15 degree difference you can see how much this one here has been opened up the leaf has been opened up and extracted much quick much more quickly than this one where the leaf is still opening up so that's a perfect visual example of how the temperature of the water affects the rate at which the leaf will open and extract which means that the lower temperature water one you have more control than the higher temperature water one okay going to put the camera back and we're going to taste right tasting time so you've already seen the color difference between the 80 degree water and the 95 degree water you've also seen how the leaf reacts differently according to the temperature of the water but what's most important is taste so let's taste so this is the 80 degree soft lively very fragrant like like morning dew are over over a meadow that beautiful kind of bright freshness it's also got some vegetal notes so spinach those very green spinach notes it also has a slight sweetness like a kind of new potato with the skin still still on that that kind of sweetness and it's got a lovely balance between bright and a slight astringency so a nice little bit of grip so you get this nice refreshment so it's a beautiful balance one shun malfunction because it's very easy to throw the balance out okay wonderful let's taste the 95-degree and see if it makes any difference honestly a world of difference I'm actually shocked at the level of difference that this has made this case or first of all it's very dry and it's and it's got a lot more bitterness so it certainly has extracted more of those catechins and the taste is just really dull it's woody it's it's um it's woody it's dusty it tastes almost like an old tea like something that's about two years old when it's actually less than a year old it's it's remarkable the difference that just that 10 to 15 degrees makes yeah it tastes dead and dusty and just not very good whereas this one bright lively fragrant juicy wonderful a really completely different tea so you've got the same leaf you've got the same amount of leaf to water ratio you've got the same tea where you've got the same steeping time and just that 10 to 15 degrees difference has made two completely different teas I would highly recommend that you try this at home and I think you'll agree with me that 80 degrees is the perfect starting point listen if you like your teas to be more tannic if you like them to be drier and slightly more bitter then brew hot by all means this is just a guideline but I think 80 degrees is the perfect starting point I hope that answers your question to the viewer who left the comment if you made it to the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs up check out our playlist and just like the other viewer who wrote to us if you have any ideas for videos that you'd like us to make then please let us know if you're in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over we always try and answer them other than that i'm don made from a leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from the teabags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 269,130

Keywords: how to make green tea, tea, how to brew tea, tea tasting, Green tea, how to make tea, brewing tea, cup of tea, tea making, white tea, cuppa, chinese tea, japanese tea, teatime, tea leaves, loose leaf tea, tea recipe, water temperature tea, чай, green tea recipe, китайский чай, black tea, how to make, пуэр, pu erh tea, camellia sinensis, мойчай, teacup, tea ceremony, red tea, oolong tea, oolong, perfect green tea, brewing green tea, instruction, how to, health benefits

Id: spTBscGMG2c

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2016