Photomancer,
Thanks for your many ideas. Great analysis. You are thinking like I am.
Conductivity might not do much because most of the compounds are organic and I suspect not ionized. pH is a good idea to evaluate anyway because there might be a correlation between pH and some quality I want in the tea. Yes, the varietal or moreso the type (green, oolong, black, pu-erh) makes a huge difference in optics. Temperature is a huge factor and that is what I’m investigating. I’m not going for speed but instead some product of yield x quality and temp / brew time will be the independent variable. Have thought about refractometry. Might be too low in TDS but might work.
BTW, I was in the same camp re tea for years. I grew up with instant tea an could more or less take it or leave it - mostly leave it. I’d rather have water. But my wife got interested in tea from an agricultural point of view. We planted some in east Tx, about an acre. Turns out that tea is the #2 drink in the world behind water. You would not believe the amazing qualities of a good tea. I am still amazed. What we get in this country is basically trash tea, the stems, the chaff and dust from the tea industry that is bagged and standardized to taste exactly the same every year x forever = terrible. It is cut from the bush or ‘tree’ by mowers and vacuumed off the ground. The average wholesale price of this product is around $2.5 per kilo.
Now, look at ‘real’ tea that I would now drink and that you might even like. Even teas from ‘Teavana’ etc are almost junk and they are still standardized for that franchise. They mostly sell herbal infusions or tisanes. Tea comes from the camelia plant C. Sinensis only. Although there are different varietals or sub species, the different ‘kinds’ like green, white, oolong, black, pu-erh are the exact same leaf, just processed differently and allowed a different fermentation process. I only learned this stuff a little over a year ago so I’m really not an expert on this, but fascinated by what I did not know.
Good teas are hand picked (incredibly labor intensive) - like my wife and I picked for over an hour for one # of tea that yielded about 100 gm after processing. But the taste was amazing. Proper tea picking of excellent tea is typically the end of the stem in the form of 1) just the bud 2) bud and one leaf 3) bud and two leaves. Only a small percent are picked so as not to disturb the plant. Some are wild and over 100 years old and grow under a forest canopy. Most are cultivated in small villages or on plantations.
The descriptions of them are insane. Like reading about a great wine or scotch. I’ll find some and post. But seriously, the good ones are amazing in their quality and nothing like the bitter stuff that I can totally do without.
OK, a long winded story to explain what I’m doing. I’m experimenting with titration of temp, leaf to water ratio, brewing time and even pressure to try and extract the best from the best of these really nice teas. I’m sure it’s been done in some form but I can’t find that info and really need to do it myself since it’s really subjective.
Real tea aficionados would say that is getting too technical and ruining the ceremonial aspect of tea brewing but being an engineering nerd and just wanting a good and consistent product without all the fuss, I thought I’d look at being scientific with the process. I have about a dozen really good Chinese teas from Yunnan province that I’m playing with. Some are from small farms that only produce 10 or fewer kg per year. It took me months to find and get them.
Prices on the high end of rare, loose tea can be $1 per gram (almost $600 per pound) but most are much less. As crazy as that sounds, an efficient brewing of these could mean a lot in terms of cost of the final product. At somewhere around 200 ml per loose leaf tea gram for the final extraction ratio, that is still under $1 per brewed cup for the most expensive one. BTW I only bought samples, like 25 gm of the ultra pricey ones.
Would be cool to do a sampling at DMS sometime of the really good ones. I’ve got about 6 I really like but it is, of course, subjective.
Here’s a simple video on tea that will put you at about the 99.9% level of tea knowledge in comparison to others. . .
