How many times can you infuse tea?
I was wondering about this ever since I read that Oolong tea can be infused up to several times. I did a quick web search and came up with this answer.
How Many Infusions?
This really depends on your taste and the quality of the tea. Old tea that has lost its fragrant oils or has been heavily processed will likely only do with one infusion. Better quality teas will infuse better. Generally, green and white tea can be infused a number of times and good Oolong tea can be infused as many as seven times with the same leaves. The Chinese say you derive different pleasures from each successive infusion.
There you have it.
Afternoon Tea
Now that I’m a tea drinker someone told me that to really get the fulll experience of tea and the food served along with it, I should do afternoon tea at the Willard InterContinental in Washington, DC.
Washington’s historic Willard InterContinental now offers Afternoon Tea in Peacock Alley. The new Afternoon Tea provides guests premium seating at elegantly appointed tables set in the hotel’s Peacock Alley — one of Washington’s prime locations to “stroll, strut, see and be seen” for nearly a century.
While I may actually do this one day you have to keep in mind that it is pricey. On another note it would appear that afternoon tea has a very long history.
From Wikipedia..
Afternoon tea is a light meal typically eaten between 3pm and 5pm. It originated in the United Kingdom when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II in 1661 and brought the practice of drinking tea in the afternoon with her from Portugal. Various places that belonged to the former British Empire also have such a meal. However, changes in social customs and working hours mean that most Britans only take afternoon tea on special/formal occasions.
Traditionally, loose tea is served in a teapot with milk and sugar. This is accompanied by various sandwiches (customarily cucumber, egg and cress, fish paste, ham, and smoked salmon), scones (with butter, clotted cream and jam — see cream tea) and usually cakes and pastries (such as Battenberg, fruit cake or Victoria sponge). The food is often served on a tiered stand.
While afternoon tea used to be an everyday event, nowadays it is more likely to be taken as a treat in a hotel, café, or tea shop, although many Britons still have a cup of tea and slice of cake or some chocolate at teatime. Accordingly, many hotels now market a champagne cream tea.
Anna Maria Stanhope, Duchess of Bedford, is credited as the first person to have transformed afternoon tea in England into a meal rather than a simple refreshment.
Mint Tea
A co-worker of mine and I were talking about the latest tea she added to her stash. That tea is called Moroccan Mint from Teaism in DC. Now i’m not exaclty a huge fan of mint but it can be good if used the right way.
Moroccan Mint is:
A blend of a Vietnamese green tea with organic spearmint, great hot or iced.
My co-worker then directed me to a Wikipedia entry on Moroccan tea culture. It would appear that mint tea is extremley popular.
Moroccan-style mint tea is now commonly served all through North Africa. It is served not only at mealtimes but all through the day, and it is especially a drink of hospitality, commonly served whenever there are guests. Unlike Moroccan food, cooked by women, this tea is traditionally a man’s affair: prepared by the head of the family, it is served to guests, and it is impolite to refuse it.
I was also told that mint leaves on their own with hot water is also good.
Pu-erh Tea
So I was on line at
Starbucks about to buy my cinnamon scone (they do have a good cinnamon scone btw) and engaged in a conversation with a barista (support the
Starbucks Union!) who asked me how my loose leaf tea venture was going. They knew I had stopped buying my usual mocha lattee or their
Tazo lattes because I was doing the loose leaf thing now. I’ve totally left coffee, sorry.
The barista actually mentioned to me this tea which he said he thought was amazing. He had said you could get it from some tea shop in Portland, Oregon if I recall correctly. He referred to the tea as something by the name of po’ver or pu’ver. When I went to search for it online the closet thing I found was a tea by the name of Pu-erh. I will assume that was the tea he was talking about as Wikipedia also
mentions a spelling that is similar to the barista’s spelling of the tea.
Pu-erh, Pu’er tea, Puer tea or Bolay tea is a type of tea made from a “large leaf” variety of the tea plant Camellia sinensis and named after Pu’er county near Simao, Yunnan, China.
Pu-erh tea can be purchased as either raw/green (sheng) or ripened/cooked (shou), depending on processing method or aging. Sheng pu-erh can be roughly classified on the tea oxidation scale as a green tea, and the shou or aged-green variants as post-fermented tea. The fact that pu-erh fits in more than one tea type poses some problems for classification. For this reason, the “green tea” aspect of pu-erh is sometimes ignored, and the tea is regarded solely as a post-fermented product. Unlike other teas that should ideally be consumed shortly after production, pu-erh can be drunk immediately or aged for many years; pu-erh teas are often now classified by year and region of production much like wine vintages.
This tea does look interesting. It appears to be a little different from what you would normally consider tea.
