Menta or hierbabuena?

One of the spells of foreign languages is that they aren't just a bunch of new words, properly ordered by the laws of its grammar. Language reflects how native people is, how they think, how they live. A language is the way we express ourselves and how we communicate. Obviously, there's much more to it than rules. I love learning new languages and, when I'm living in another country, learning the local language is the most important to do.

Languages also have their idiosyncrasies, I accepted it and learnt to live with it. When I don't understant what gave birth to an expression or to a motto I immediately go and check. That's the most valuabel thing I did while learning the languages I can speak. Sometimes, these idiosyncrasies lead to a clash.

Just like what happened with mint. I think everybody know mint, a family of spicy herbs. As I told you, I love tea. And in summertime, I love drinking Tuareg tea, a Moroccan specialty made with a variety of mint called spearmint and Gunpowder tea. For best results, fresh spearmint leaves are required, so I went out looking for them.

One thing I knew for sure: Spaniards call this specialty Té con hierbabuena. Being a so widely spoken language, it turns out that, despite the order that the Real Academia tries to impose, hierbabuena is a term that identifies different plants depending on the country you are. This fact explained why I was receiving so doubtful answers from whoever I asked about mint and hierbabuena. It seemed like everybody's got his theory! Some Spaniards even thought that hierbabuena was not a kind of mint. Well, but I was pretty sure! Despite the Arabic name of the drink, I sawed and rose spearmint myself.

An evidence that seemed to fail, here in Spain. Fortunately it came out that hierbabuena is spearmint. In Spain, too, where everything (else) is different. I clashed not with an idiosyncrasy of the language this time: I clashed with widespread ignorance.

Choosing the tea: tea grades

You're having great cups of tea, aren't you? Not yet? Well, start reading about tea just to know what you're missing. Then read about how to prepare your great cup of tea. To prepare a good cup of tea you need the basic ingredient: good tea.

Now, if you go to the nearest tea shop you'd probably stumble upon a variety of tea with exotic names. Many of them are just commercial names given by producers to capture the attention of the inexperienced ones. Would you buy a One thousand and one night or a Darjeeling S.F.T.G.F.O.P.? That's what marketing is for...

Tea grades

Tea grades are not standardized and the only stable tea gradation scale is black tea's. Evaluating the quality of tea is much like evaluating the quality of wine: a great of number of parameters enter the equation. Contry and region of origin, plant, harvest period, to make a few examples. Tea grades, nevertheless, are one of the methods to classify tea and a basic understanding my help you while purchasing your tea.

As far as it concerns green teas, as explained, there's no grading standard and the system may vary from producer to producer. In the case of green tea, moreover, parameters such as the tea plant, the growth stage of the plant and the geographical region are considered when grading tea. Nevertheless, many green tea grading systems are based on the black tea grading system, which is the one I'm going to detail here.

One of the factors to take into account when choosing a tea is the manufacturing process (manual of mechanical) and the size of the leaves.

Orange Pekoe

Before introducing you to black tea grades you should know about the word Pekoe. The origin of the word is disputed, as suggested by this Wikipedia article. This word is prominently used in the tea grading system and refers to entire leafs of the same size. The word Orange does not imply any orange flavors added to the tea. Its use seems to date back to the first Dutch merchants.

Grades

The main grades are (from worst to best):

• D (Dust): As the word implies, this refers to tea leaves' dust, mainly used to produce the (in)famous tea bags you're surely used to.
• Choppy: pieces of broken leaves.
  
• F (Fanning): Fanning refer to pieces of the tea leaf. As Dust, it's a very low quality tea used mainly in tea bags.
  
• B.O.P. (Broken Orange Pekoe):
  
• O.P. (Orange Pekoe)
• F.O.P. (Flowery Orange Pekoe)

Complementing the traits above, the grade may be enriched by:

• G (Golden): It refers to the golden hue which is characteristic of the youngest buds.
  
• T (Tippy): It refers to tea tips.
  

Sometimes, the best tea quality grade may also be enriched by:

• F (Fine)
• S.F. (Super Fine)

Examples

To understand how to read tea grades, I'll make some examples here.

• G.F.O.P.: Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. Whole, young tea leaves with golden tips. The tea also bears flowers of the tea plant.
• T.G.F.O.P.: Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. This tea contains whole young tea with golden teas. The leaves are the uppermost ones of the plant. The tea also bears flowers of the tea plant.
  
• F.T.G.F.O.P.: Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. One of the highest qualities available.

Conclusion

You just had a brief introduction to tea grades. That'll be great the next time you go to your favorite tea shop and choose the right tea for you without wondering about what those strange letters stand for.

Would you like a cup of tea?

Categorizing things like cuisine may be challenging, if not impossible. Art cannot be classified and categorized with algorithms. But, there surely are best practices you cannot ignore including when doing art. And you should know that the perfect cup of tea is artwork. Or, at least, good craftsmanship.

Didn't you know that? Or perhaps you don't even like tea? Well, maybe you just drank canned and over-edulcorated cold tea or, worse, some cup of hot water with an industrial low quality tea bag. No, that's not tea. The same way an American coffee is not an Italian espresso.

Let's see if I can help you discover your hidden love for tea or, at least, help you enjoy a healthy and flavored cup of tea.

The tools
Every craftsman needs its tools. To make a good cup of tea you need (in no particular order):

• Patience.
• Good quality tea.
• Good quality water (oh yes).
• A kettle.
• A teapot.
• An infuser.
  
• Experience.

The tea

First, the obvious: the perfect tea cup only comes with high quality tea. Don't shop for mainstream tea bags (that's just finely ground leaves and who knows what). There are higher quality tea bags but that aren't so easily found as tea leaves. Determining the quality of a leaf isn't a newbie's job, even if you can follow the suggestions I'll give you in the Tea thread.

Now, tea is just a name for the leafs of a class of plants: Camellia Sinensis. You can find plenty of different types of teas out there and the first thing you should be aware of are the basics. Maybe you know that there's black, green, red (and God knows what else) tea on the market. Yes, but the plant is just the same. In another series of posts I'm writing about the kinds of tea and its classifications.

I cannot tell you which tea to choose, that's a matter of taste! If you absolutely don't know where to start, go to a local tea seller and buy small bags of different types: at least one green and one black. Be aware, moreover, that tea shops sell a great number of flavored tea blends, some of which are real classic, such as Earl Grey black tea, which is flavored with bergamot orange essential oil. Personally, I regularly consume:

• Earl Grey (Black tea).
• Gunpowder (Green tea).
• Gunpowder and fresh mint (blended at home)

Discovering new flavors and blends is part of the magic and it might be your game for the years to come!

Water

Water is the other great ingredient: you must start with fresh and good water. If you don't like your tap water, then use bottled water. Bad water, bad tea. I also said fresh water because heaters might extract oxygen from water, which is fundamental during the flavor extraction process.

Heating water in the kettle

Heating water is a delicate process: depending on the type of tea you're gonig to brew, water must be heated at a recommended temperature. Basically, the less oxidized the tea is, the colder the water. Black tea requires rolling boil while green teas require an inferior temperature.

Please, don't go around with thermometers! Rolling boil is easy to recognize, and must only be used for completely oxidized teas. Also remember that boiling water oxygen level get lower, so don't let the water boil for a long time nor heat twice the same water. That would spoil your perfect cup of tea!

Gentler teas, such as white and green, are easily burnt by too hot a water: you'll learn to recognize immediately the bitter taste such tea assumes. Your taste will also play the game: I learned with time the exact temperature for each of the teas I drink. The first times you'll experiment with it, take note on the bags you bought.

A small resume may be this (temperatures are approximate):

• Green/White teas: 160/180 F (70/80 C)
• Oolong tea: 190 F (90 C)
• Black tea: 212 F (100 C)
  

At 70 F, more or less, water begin to steam and, if you open the kettle, will notice small bubbles starting to rise to the surface. Since then, you can easily make an estimate and begin to learn your kettle.

The quantity of tea you're going to steep depends on the water you're going to use: a regular tea cup is 200 ml. You can just weigh your favorite mug and determine where's the imaginary 200ml line. Some mugs, moreover, come with some illustration on the inner side to indicate it. Look into your mugs and if you're the happy owner of one of these!

The teapot

While waiting for your water to heat, you can go preparing you tea pot. The tea pot, for the water not to cool too early, must be pre-heated. You could use some of the water of the kettle, but in the meantime that water would be cooling off. It would be more difficult to calculate how much water to pour into it, also. Not too bad: just pre-heat it with hot water from the tap, then rinse well.

Once the teapot is ready, throw inside the tea. The correct quantity, guess what? You've got to experiment! It depends on the quality of the tea, on its freshness, on its kind and, of course, on your tastes! The usual dosis is 3 gr (a level tea spoon) per mug.

Brewing your tea

There are multiple brewing techniques:

• Loose leaves in a teapot
• Mug infusers
• French presses
• Tea balls

One thing to remember when brewing your perfect cup of tea is that the leaves have to unfold and during the process will rise their volumes. Moreover, leaves should be left free to move during the infusion for the flavor extraction process to be effective. All previous methods, except tea balls, are fine and present no problem: I always found tea balls too small and ineffective. If you are going to brew more than one cup of tea, consider using the classic teapot or a French press. If you're brewing just a cup, consider buying a good mug infuser, or basket filter taking into account that they don't fit well into every mug.

Steep time

Now your tea leaves are unfolding inside the warm water. It's a beautiful process to look at and gives even more taste to your perfect cup of tea! If you're starting to familiarize with that particular kind of tea, you can use a spoon and try the tea every bunch of seconds to appreciate how its taste evolves and determine when it's ready for you. You'll also familiarize with the point of no return: that's where you're perfect cup isn't such any longer. Consider as a guidance the following steep times to begin with:

• Low oxidation teas: 2 to 3 minutes.
• High oxidation teas: 4 to 5 minutes.

Take into account, also, that leaves must be free to move but you must not stir them (let alone squeeze them!), not even gently with a spoon. It's too typical an error which only gets more tannins released, spoiling the flavor of your tea.

Conclusion and tips

You can now start and prepare your first cup of tea! I hope you enjoy it. The last tip I'll tell you is a consequence of what you read in Steeping time. If you're going to prepare more tea and drink it over time, don't let the tea in the teapot with the leaves. Remove it, instead.

Tea

I'm a real fan of tea. Since I was a child, tea's what warmed me during the winter, freshened during the summer, and delighted every noon of my life. A life without tea wouldn't be the same. Even Nobel Prize W.B. Yeats, mourning the rape of a child (in The stolen child), describes this way the melancholy of the now empty kitchen:

[...]
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
[...]

Tea is everywhere and surely everybody has had one cup. The problem is that finding, and preparing, a good tea is pretty much rarer than it may seem.

In another post, I'm telling you the basics to prepare your perfect cup of tea: maybe you'll discover and be faithful to a new taste, to new flavors you didn't know before.

In this series of post, I'll introduce you to the basic classification of teas. I say basics because tea is just like coffee or wine: if we began classifying, we wouldn't know when we'd end... Nevertheless such classification is important because it has direct implication on your perfect cup of tea: water temperature and steep time are a function of these parameters.

Geographical regions

Just like as wine, tea of different geographical regions may have peculiarities as well (such as Darjeeling). Cultivation for commercial production has meant that, with years and demand, teas is now cultivated in regions well out of the traditional tropical and subtropical zone. This has also meant that traditional indigenous species, such as Chines Tea (Camellia Sinensis Sinensis) are now cultivated in Europe as well. As far as it concerns our interests, I only remind you that tea has been traditionally classified by cultivation region in India and China. Indian most known tea, for example, is Darjeeling, which is named after the Darjeeling region whose climatological characteristics give that tea its peculiarities.

Oxidation level

As far as it concerns the average user kind of teas, the only interesting difference is the oxidation level attained by the processing of the parts of the plant used to produce tea.

Now, the basic types of tea, organized by oxidation, are:

• White tea.
• Black tea.
• Green tea.
• Oolong tea.
• Pu-Erh tea.

A little note about red tea: there's no red tea (in Western Countries). What we call black (fully oxidized) tea is indeed what Eastern people call red tea. There's also another misnomer for red tea: rooibos. Rooibos is not a tea. Some tea shops which don't deserve their name may try to convince you but no, Rooibos plant just is not a Camellia Sinensis.

In order or oxidation (from smallest to greatest) you find:

• White tea: completely unoxidized.
• Green tea: low oxidation.
• Oolong tea: the most common in China, between a 10% to a 70% level of oxidation.

Pu-Erh stands aside because it's a tea produced with different variety of the tea plant (the largest) and, moreover, is produced in a particular region of China: Pu-Erh, indeed.

Black tea, least but not last, is the most oxidized variety of tea, with a characteristic flavor, color and level of caffeine.