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THE PERFECT CUP OF TEA

JON FASMAN | ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE | December 6th 2007

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Jon Fasman makes a cup of tea--green tea, that is. And he does it properly. With some kit. So properly that the tea tastes delicate and rich, astringent and refreshing--as alive and nuanced as an aged Bordeaux ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, December 2007

Every evening after dinner, for as long as I've known her, my wife has practised a simple ritual: she takes a bag of tea from the cupboard above the stove, drops it in a cup, fills a kettle with water, boils the water, pours it over the teabag and lets it steep for a few minutes. She calls this "making a cup of tea", and she seems to enjoy it.

This morning, I decided to try it for myself. First, I chose which of the 16 types of loose-leaf tea lined up on my desk in little green boxes best suited my mood. Song yang or pouchong? Keemun Gold or Yunnan Concerto? White, green, oolong or black? Once decided (I went for Silver Needle, a white tea that looked like fuzzy rosemary and smelled like dusty honey), I measured two teaspoons into an "IngenuiTEA": a single-cup teapot made for loose tea kindly provided for a day's experimenting by Adagio, a manufacturer of brewers' gadgetry. I set an adjustable "UtiliTEA" kettle to the appropriate setting for white tea, waited for the water to come to precisely 180 degrees Fahrenheit, poured the water over the leaves, let them steep for exactly seven minutes, then set the IngenuiTEA atop a mug, thus releasing a valve and letting the steeped tea strain into my mug.

Had I not wanted to drink my tea immediately, I could have made it using, yes, a TriniTEA, a machine that steeps tea at the proper temperature for the proper amount of time-both variables being easily changeable depending on type and amount of leaf-and keeps it warm for hours: it is, in essence, a coffee-maker for tea.

Now, I like an absorbing ritual as much as the next mildly autistic kitchen geek, but I couldn't help finding this a little ridiculous. I had always thought of tea as "the hot drink I never particularly want", or "the hot drink that isn't coffee", and while I knew vaguely about Japanese tea ceremonies and Russian samovars, it had never occurred to me that procedure as simple as boil, steep, drink could be made so incredibly complicated. Until, that is, I took a sip of the Silver Needle. It was extraordinary: as alive and nuanced as an aged Bordeaux, at once delicate and rich, astringent and refreshing, it was something not to gulp idly, but to savour and contemplate. For comparison's sake, I made a cup the old-fashioned way: I set a (non-adjustable) kettle on to boil, then steeped the leaves for while. The result was flat and dull.

These are boom times for tea: over the past 16 years, tea-sales in the United States alone have grown from $1.8 to $6.5bn, with the largest growth in the high-end and specialty sectors. The popularity of green and white teas have soared (green tea is tea that has been lightly fermented, while white teas are simply picked and dried), thanks to their healthy reputation. Yet when it comes to proper brewing, green tea consumers suffer from near-universal incompetence.

When made with boiling, rather than merely hot, water, green tea turns bitter and soapy. Michael Cramer, Adagio's founder, tells me that "people think if tea tastes like medicine, it must be 'working'." Needless to say, properly made green tea has all the health benefits--without tasting like furniture polish.

The legend is that tea was born when some Camilla sinensis leaves fell into a pot in which the Chinese emperor Shen-Nung was boiling water, several thousand years ago. In more recent centuries, most of us have fallen to drinking shredded, poor-quality tea stuffed in porous paper sacks. It seems scientific ingenuity has returned tea to a state Shen-Nung might recognize, even if it does turn my wife's simple ritual into a sort of kitchen ballet.

(The Utilitea, Trinitea and Ingenuitea are available from www.adagio.com; prices from $19 [€13.50] plus shipping.)