Skip to main content

On brewing tea

I watched a video interview with the 10th heir of Twinings Tea Company, that has been merchandising tea for over 300 years. In the interview, among talking about the family history, and the story behind their bestselling tea flavor—Earl Grey—he talked about the best way to brew tea, whether using loose leaves, or a tea bag.

To extract the most flavor out of tea, he recommended bringing cold water to a boil, and removing the kettle off the stove once the water starts boiling. His theory is that the flavor is extracted through the air in the water, and continuing to boil the water further, will reduce the amount of air in it.

For green teas, he recommends letting the kettle set for 5 mins, then pouring the hot water over the tea, and for black teas, he recommends pouring the hot water immediately over the tea. The heir advised against removing the bag, or repeatedly dunking it in the water during brewing, because that only changes the color of the water, and makes the tea bitter without extracting flavor. On the contrary, he recommends leaving the tea bag still for 3 minutes, and then throwing it away, enjoying the flavorful tea, adding milk, or lemon, but never sugar, as it masks the tea flavor.


I followed his advice verbatim, and while I am not sure if the effect is psychological or real, I drank the best cup of tea in years. No bitterness, no sweetness, just great tea flavor.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kindle Paperwhite

I have always been allergic to buying specialized electronic devices that do only one thing, such as the Kindle, the iPod, and fitness trackers. Why buy these when technology evolves so fast that a multi-purpose device such as the phone or a smart watch can eventually do the same thing, but with the convenience of updates that fix bugs and add functionality? So, I was shocked when this weekend I made an impulse buy and got the newest Kindle Paperwhite—a special purpose device for reading eBooks. I was walking past the Amazon store in the mall and saw that the newest Kindle Paperwhites were marked down by $40 for the holidays. The device looked good in the display, so I went in to look at it closely. The Paperwhite is small and light, with a 6” screen that is backlit and waterproof.   The text was crisp and readable, and in the ambient light, it felt like I am reading a printed book. I was sold and bought it on the spot. At home I have struggled to put it down. The bo...
2 comments
Read more

A paper a day keeps the doctor away: NoDB

In most database systems, the user defines the shape of the data that is stored and queried using concepts such as entities and relations. The database system takes care of translating that shape into physical storage, and managing its lifecycle. Most of the systems store data in the form of tuples, either in row format, or broken down into columns and stored in columnar format. The system also stores metadata associated with the data, that helps with speedy retrieval and processing. Defining the shape of the data a priori, and transforming it from the raw or ingestion format to the storage format is a cost that database systems incur to make queries faster. What if we can have fast queries without incurring that initial cost? In the paper " NoDB: Efficient Query Execution on Raw Data Files ", the authors examine that question, and advocate a system (NoDB) that answers it. The authors start with the motivation for such a system. With the recent explosion of data...
Post a Comment
Read more

A paper a day keeps the doctor away: MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale

The recent data explosion, and the increase in appetite for fast results spurred a lot of interest in low-latency data processing systems. One such system is MillWheel, presented in the paper " MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale ", which is widely used at Google. In MillWheel, the users specify a directed computation graph that describe what they would like to do, and write application code that runs on each individual node in the graph. The system takes care of managing the flow of data within the graph, persisting the state of the computation, and handling any failures that occur, relieving the users from that burden. MillWheel exposes an API for record processing, that handles each record in an idempotent fashion, with an exactly once delivery semantics. The system checkpoints progress with a fine granularity, removing the need to buffer data between external senders. The authors describe the system using the Zeitgeist produ...
Post a Comment
Read more