Comment by gilrain
10 days ago
It depends on the tea you’re brewing, what you want to make with it, and your personal taste. How could there possibly be an objective answer?
10 days ago
It depends on the tea you’re brewing, what you want to make with it, and your personal taste. How could there possibly be an objective answer?
Perhaps not, but there are very objective, erm, pathways.
Want to avoid dissolving the more bitter flavor components? Steep at a lower temperature. Solubility curves are quasi-exponential with temperature, and a reduction from 95 to 85 C can spread out the time before tannins are strongly dissolved. You could get the exact same flavor at 95, perhaps, if you used a stopwatch. But objectively, the tea will get much more bitter a few seconds later. Objective lesson: to allow for ease in steeping timing, use a lower temperature. It's especially true for green teas, which (objectively) have more bittering compounds than fermented teas.
But: many Chinese people enjoy their green teas at a saturation (color) that I would call barely-not-water. Many Brits enjoy black breakfast teas brewed to levels I would only use to dye cloth. Plenty of subjectivity.