There is such a thing as too many leaves in a pot...

I didn't think it was possible, but I managed to put in too much pu-erh into too little water. This has caused my tea to be so ridiculously thick that it's almost syrupy! Normally I like this, but this is very thick even for me. When I swirl it around it leaves trails that are noticeable from a distance around the inside of my cup. My solution? You betcha I'm diluting it as I pour it. Hahaha. But oh my goodness, this is just too much tea for one person. I wish I'd made this for a group of people. I suppose this is a good lesson about keeping up with dishes for the poor college student.

To be more truthful though, this is a good lesson about utilizing my resources properly. As I keep reminding you all, I'm a poor college student (much more so now that I finally bought my ticket to Japan for winter break!!!!), and therefore I cannot buy as much tea or teaware as I'd love to. I suppose I could convert this blog into a tea reviewing one, but I find all the background stories around tea (the research and just sharing it with people) to be a more interesting writing topic to me. Instead, I have to be very meticulous in not only what I buy, but also in how I consume. There are a few ways I could do this. Drinking less often is out of the question for me. I end up getting dehydrated when I'm too busy to drink tea for a few days, not to mention I enjoy being happy. It's not very convenient for me to put in less tea leaves when I'm making a brew too, because especially for my cooked pu-erhs, I enjoy them thick. However! I have come to the realization that I have one more option. Use a smaller gaiwan! Here is a picture of all of my tea brewing vessels:

 Normally I use either my brown gaiwan or my small yixing in the back. The yixing is actually a bit bigger than the gaiwan, but still not big enough to overfill my fairness pitcher. I use it for my coooked pu-erhs, and when I finally get around to prepping the flat gaiwan I will decide what I'm going to use it for. All of those are good for sharing with about 6-8people maximum. 

I love my beautiful kyusu. But it's big! Hahaha. It's pretty difficult to make anything in it to drink for just myself. I either do pu-erhs that I can just leave in indefinitely or green teas in cold water so that I don't have to worry about over brewing. I heard I could do this with lightly oxidized oolongs too, so when I open up this one I'm currently keeping safe and sealed I'll try that out.

Finally, draw your eyes to the little cute white gaiwan with plum blossoms in the front. I think I have pictures of it up from before, but anyways, this was my first gaiwan! I bought it in a very nice cute little travel set that I used extensively last year since it included a very nice ceramic tea tray. I haven't used it very much this year though, because finally I bought all of the other tea ware you see (except the black and red yixing in the back which I had before), but I've come to the conclusion that it would be best for me to use this one when I'm making tea for myself. 

In the U.S., we are constantly bombarded with "BIGGER IS BETTER!" I think this trend is going away now, but as this was the theme of my childhood it has definitely left it's subconscious impact. When I bought the plum blossom gaiwan set and the previous yixing teapot, I got their small size for the sake of traveling. In fact, I thought that they would be too small for even one person. No no no! From now on I will be using my plum blossom gaiwan when serving myself. It really should make enough for me, especially considering how many times I get brews out of my leaves. I need to get away from this American "big=good" ideology and more into thinking on the smaller side and keeping everything in moderation. 

By using a smaller gaiwan I use less leaves, am more mindful of how much I drink, and will hopefully avoid wasting good tea in the future like I did with making an entire thick pot of a delicious pu-erh in that large kyusu. Mindfulness and moderation are wonderful principals to live by. Let's hope they help me and my wallet along my college journey.

Review: Decaffeination of fresh green tea leaf (Camellia sinensis) by hot water treatment (Liang et al., 2007)

There are many things about college I love, but almost none more than free access to an unlimited amount of academic research journals. Since the start of this blog, I have promised all of you that I one of the things I would do would be to read and review and summarize tea research articles for you. The post before last I gave you some very small tidbits, but this post I will go much more in depth and I hope you will join the discussion by commenting.

This article, Decaffeination of fresh green tea leaf (Camellia sinensis) by hot water treatment (see bottom for citation and reference link), is not the most interesting one I've ever read. What it ends up saying is that if you boil the fresh tea leaves for 3-5 minutes in the step before rolling and drying (basically replacing the pan frying or steaming part of making Chinese green tea), you can remove around 90% of the caffeine without removing the catechins (what we love about tea).

As many of you know, there is a very large and old witch tale flying around that says that if you boil tea for 30 seconds and then discard that, your tea will be decaffeinated. This study just goes to show again that this does not happen. At 1 minute at boiling of fresh tea leaves (not even what would qualify as green tea) only about 50% of the caffeine was removed while you need to reach at least 80% to be able to consider it decaffeinated. Greater than 80% caffeine removal only happened when the time reached at least 3 minutes at boiling water. (Don't forget that what happens to fresh leaves is different from what happens to any type of later processed tea leaves that we drink from too.) When they tried 3 minutes boiling on processed leaves (what could actually be counted as green tea), they found that the leaves were essentially decaffeinated. Unfortunately by then the cell walls were so broken that 90% of the catechins were also removed, therefore making your leaves useless and likely disgusting tasting. Did I really need to tell many of you that, though? Hahaha. I'm pretty sure that when you read "3 minutes boiling on (green tea)" many of you cringed and/or may have nearly cried at the thought like me. Hahahahaha.

So why does processing the fresh leaves into green tea change the amount of catechins removed? Catechin removal requires breaking the cell walls, which happens when leaves are broken by stirring during pan frying and definitely when rolled and dried. I wonder if this then means that there would be a significant difference between the amount of catechins released into the tea from something like Longjing vs. Gunpowder green teas though? Since one is very obviously rolled more than the other.

Another one of the points it makes in discussing how to decaffeinate the fresh leaves is that the water should be at boiling for decaffeination to happen. Somewhere below the boiling point (between 100C and 75C) the caffeine is no longer removed from the fresh leaf. In their table of results from this part (see Table 2), it's interesting to see that while that basically no caffeine is removed from the fresh leaves at 50C (the lowest of the tested temperatures), a significant amount of catechins are (~10% after 5 minutes). Because their study was about decaffeination as opposed to catechin extraction though, they did not test what happened in processed green tea leaves at these lower temperatures. It seems counter-intuitive to me that while normally catechin removal would require breaking the cell walls, brewing at lower temperatures before those steps also released them.

Even after processing the fresh leaves into actual tea, does do lower temperatures affect how much caffeine and catechins go into the water? Or are the cells so broken by then that there is no difference based on brewing temperature? Based on personal experience, I do believe that lower temperatures change the ratio of what goes into the tea since the taste is different. I just wish I had scientific evidence backing me up and explaining exactly what that taste difference was caused by. Maybe I'll find that in another article.

Reference:
Huiling Liang, Yuerong Liang, Junjie Dong, Jianliang Lu, Hairong Xu, Hui Wang, Decaffeination of fresh green tea leaf (Camellia sinensis) by hot water treatment, Food Chemistry, Volume 101, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 1451-1456, ISSN 0308-8146, 10.1016/j.foodchem.2006.03.054. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814606002998) Keywords: Decaffeinated tea; Green tea; Black tea; Caffeine; Catechins; EGCg; HPLC; Polyphenol oxidase

Quick post about the increase in ads...

Google AdSense is changing things in December, so in order for me to not forget to change how the ads are placed around my blog, I just changed them early. I'm sorry for how annoying they are, but I'm a poor college student and any chance of any tiny bit of income is very necessary for me.

Don't worry about there being more ads, in December a few of those will go away on their own. I hope in general these ads do not deter you from viewing my blog. I sincerely appreciate each and every one of you who read my posts and if you have any complaints about the placement of the ads or anything, please let me know so I can move things around for you.

Research tidbits! Yay!

I've told you time and time again that I swore I was going to do some "reviews" and summaries of some scientific articles, but just haven't gotten around to it. UNTIL NOW!

Quick update on my tea research obsession: I have 43 research papers on tea in my new tea folder. I've switched over to using gmail a lot more recently, and have found that I also really like using their storage space that sorts with folders and all those fun things and is really easy to upload and even work with online directly. All of these articles have to do with a lot of different things. Many have to do with caffeine, but honestly that's pretty much been said and done.

A lot of the new research coming out has to do with genetically analyzing the differences between cultivars, understanding what genes do what, figure out better compound isolation techniques, understanding compound synthesis and metabolism both in the live plant and in the final production of the different kinds of tea, and a lot about the anti-cancer and anti-viral properties of different kinds of tea. There is a lot I'd like to write about many of these, but some of them I need to do a lot more digging in to before I can ensure that I can convey everything about it with pretty much perfect accuracy.


Now to the tidbits~!
1) EGCG and all those catechins are catalyzed into becoming theaflavins and thearubigins in fermentation! 
2) Salt in the soil increases L-theanine in the leaves!
3) Puerh tea can help fight HIV!
4) You have to consume something like 10,000mg/kg worth of black pu-erh tea before any sort of toxicity appears. (Essentially something like several entire puerh bricks)

And next time I'm going to explore the effects of decaffeinating tea by hot water treatment on taste, based on the results from "Decaffeination of fresh green tea leaf (Camellia sinensis) by hot water treatment" by Liang et al., 2007.