On this unfortunately hot summer night I'm drinking more pu-erh like usual, listening to enya, and enjoying frozen fruit popsicles while reading. It inspired me to write another haiku. So here I am, forcing my silly and poor haiku skills on you.
Frozen fruit and tea,
On a hot summer evening,
Makes a happy me.
In addition to this, I've been thinking a lot about the best way to fill up a tea cup. Quick note, I don't think this actually affects the way the tea tastes. Hahaha. But it's certainly important for a few things things.
First off, not burning your or your guest's hands/fingers/mouth.
Being that I value my cups and brewing vessels more than my skin (skin repairs by itself for free, but broken teapots/cups/gaiwans do not and cost money), I suffer finger burns quite regularly. It hurts. Only once it's gotten to the point where a blister formed, but I've had to put on burn cream quite a few times anyways, and did I mention it HURTS??? Hahaha. So I've done some troubleshooting. Normally, as an American I think, I love a full cup. When I worked at Teavana, I noticed customers always acted like the shop and I was being really stingy by only filling the little sample cups 1/2 full.
Dear sweet customers, the tea is VERY HOT and those iddy bitty paper sample cups are not heat resistant at all. There may be a bit of stinginess involved since it takes a long time to make enough tea to fill those things once they're empty and that's especially troublesome when there are a lot of customers, but really we were hoping that you'd be able to taste the tea in a timely fashion and without causing you physical pain. It's not a conspiracy to steal food and drink from you.
If you think about it, there are three causes of this problem and more or less three solutions to keep in mind when pouring tea for either yourself or guests.
You could brew the tea at a lower temperature and just save yourself a lot of trouble. For green and white teas, this is pretty much my solution. Although that's also because I just plain like the taste of those teas better when I brew them in cold or lukewarm water.
But for herbal tisanes or oxidized teas such as oolongs, blacks, and pu-erhs though, that's really not the way to go. I suppose you could cool the tea down after you make it, but you've got problems with that too. Tea really does just plain taste better fresh. I am not a bottled tea fan, no matter the brand (out of any I'd probably trust Tao of Tea the best, though I noticed that Smith's has released a line of bottled teas too), because I'm pretty sure the longer the tea is in water the more it keeps doing. I don't know all that it does, but it does something. Hahaha. It's most noticeable with green teas where if you brew it at a higher temperature and then don't drink it quickly the tea will (if originally green in color) turn more yellow usually. I'm pretty sure this is the reason why I have never seen bottled green tea that is actually green unless they put coloring in it. But this is also the reason why I don't suggest putting the tea in the fridge. I will do that every once in a while just because I hate wasting tea if I don't have time to drink all that I made, but like I said, it's not my favorite thing to do.
Putting in ice is also not my choice because then when the ice melts (which the first few cubes will very quickly) you will be diluting the tea. Some people like to dilute their drinks, but cranberry and grape juice is the only thing I'll do that too. Would you dilute your coffee with water?
Of course, that brings up putting in milk, which I find a fairly acceptable idea for teas with spices or flowers or just plain black tea. I've never done that to an oolong though and I haven't had enough pu-erh that I wanted to waste to try it out with pu-erh except for one time when I was particularly tired which put me into a super childish "let's mix everything!!!" kind of mood. It did taste good though. And it turned out pink which was really weird. But anyways. That's a topic for another day's post.
If you were absolutely desperate to maintain your tea's flavor and cool it down quickly, I think I'd vote for freezing large glass marbles and using them like ice cubes. The glass won't interfere with the flavor at all unlike unglazed ceramic balls (commonly used to clean water and I've heard it improves tea's flavor, but that's still changing it), rocks, or plastic ice cubes (my fear would be that the heat of the tea would release BPA from the plastic into your drink, and plastic is weird in many other ways). If figure large glass marbles aren't particularly hard to find, and I'd think they'd take the change in heat pretty well which is something I'd worry more about with freezing the cup and then pouring hot tea into the cup. (I like my tea cups a lot)
Which brings me to different cup types! There's really more in choosing a tea cup than you'd imagine. You don't just want to find a pretty one or one with a texture you like in your hands and on your lips or a color to enhance your tea's color, but you also want to consider how big the cup is, the shape, and how thick the walls of it are.
You wouldn't believe the debate about which type of cup holds heat better. Thin vs. thick walled cups. I've heard that many people find that bone china (very thin walls, lovely stuff) keeps the heat in well, but I know that in Japan, winter cups are very thick. I haven't taken any thermodynamics yet so I don't trust any theories I have enough to tell you what I think. Maybe I'll test it out here soon. My mother has a huge (and gorgeous) European tea cup collection which will provide me with cups of much thinner walls. (But yet she drinks instant LIPTON. You have no idea how much it murders me when I see her doing that. It's not like she even uses a bag for crying out loud. IT'S INSTANT. *shudders*)
In some countries, tea cups have lids. I think this mostly goes for Asian ones. Almost all the infuser mugs you find from China have lids, and fancy cups for guests in Japan have lids. The idea in Japan at least is if your tea is hotter for longer, your guest will feel more welcome and stay longer.
Then of course, how much you put in the cup probably makes the most and easiest difference. If you fill up a cup all the way, it will take longer to cool down (and to drink, even those little tiny cups can manage two drinks if you fill them up too much) than if you don't. Furthermore, the tea will also heat up the cup. The advantage of European style cups is definitely their handles. Especially initially, the cup will heat up to only slightly less than that of the tea to where the tea level is inside. So if you pour in the tea to the top, the cup is also going to be hot all the way to the top. This makes it hard to hold the cup without burning your fingers when you're trying to pass the cup or just pick it up to take a sip.
If you cannot hold your cup properly, you're also likely going to spill.
Which means wasted tea, a mess, and probably burned fingers as well.
Not filling up the cup all the way is an easy fix to this, but not a perfect one. People are still going to spill tea and be clumsy. But still, better something than nothing. It's really not like it hurts anyone to force them to have to refill their cups if they want more. Honestly. I could completely rant here about over-sized USA and that NYC law, but I'll just leave it at that. Hahaha.
When your cup is filled too high it takes more times of drinking to empty it, changing the heat between each drink, making each taste colder than the last till finally you're probably like me and throwing your last half of your cup back in to your pot (I don't do this when I drink with people!) because you want at least warm tea.
Drinks and food taste different at different temperatures. Surely you've noticed that you hate cold mashed potatoes (or something), that ice cream tastes terrible when warm, or that Europeans generally think US beer tastes weak and disgusting because they drink theirs warm (sometimes I hear differently, but I really couldn't say since I don't drink beer)? Heat brings out more flavor. You want your tea to be at its best brewed temperature. But of course you want to drink it. Solution? Just don't pour in as much. Then you get to keep the majority of your tea in the pot where it'll stay hotter for longer than it would in your cup.
Just don't fill the cup up all the way. :) Ta-dah!
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