Archives
Note #154: More wisdom from the tea leaf (2025.4.30)
You may be wondering about the title of today’s note. “More wisdom? What wisdom are we building on?” Well, this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but quite some time ago I posted a note musing on wisdom I gained from a Twinings tea bag. Yes, it has taken me over sixteen years to build on the theme, but being timely has never been my strong suit.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, I changed my tea-drinking habits. I used to have a cup of whole-leaf black tea in the morning and a stronger cup of black tea with milk in the afternoon. But lately I’ve had the occasional problem getting to sleep at night, so HJ suggested that I have my stronger tea in the morning and have green tea in the afternoon instead. Green tea has less caffeine, and it also has a substance called theanine, which is supposed to help you sleep. And it does make sense to have the stronger tea in the morning rather than in the afternoon. So I gave it a shot. To be honest, I’m not sure if it has improved my sleep. Sometimes I sleep fairly well, other times I don’t, just like before. The change has, however, gotten me thinking about tea again.
There are four elements to a brew: the integrity of the tea leaf, the ratio of tea to water, the temperature of the water, and the steeping time. By “integrity” I mean how whole the leaf is. The more whole the leaf, the lighter and subtler the tea. The more you break up the tea leaf, the darker and stronger the tea will be—and the more caffeine it will contain. My formerly-afternoon-but-now-breakfast tea, Yorkshire Gold, is very fine and thus produces a very dark brew ideal for adding milk to (and for increasing your caffeine consumption).
As far as temperature and time go, different teas have different requirements. In general, the more fermented/oxidized the tea, the lower the temperature and the shorter the time. For my Yorkshire Gold, I add boiling water and brew for five minutes. Green tea, which is less oxidized than black tea, should be brewed at a lower temperature (around 80 degrees Celsius) for a shorter period of time (a couple of minutes).
So what should you do if you want your tea to be stronger? Well, what you don’t want to do is brew the tea for longer—this will just make your brew bitter. Raising the temperature of your water (for teas that don’t already use boiling water, that is) will have the same effect. But there is one element of a brew that I haven’t discussed yet: the tea-to-water ratio. If you want a stronger cup of tea, the only proper way to get it is to increase this ratio. That is, you need to add more tea. People try to get around this fact by messing with time and temperature—after all, altering these doesn’t cost anything—but they’re just fooling themselves.
You may be wondering where the wisdom is in all of this. Well, lately I’ve been swamped under an avalanche of work. Yeah, that’s a mixed metaphor, but that’s what it has felt like. I’ve got a little room to breathe at the moment, but the rest of the semester holds more avalanches and more swamps. As I was brewing my tea the other morning, though, I realized something: My tea was going to take as long as it was going to take, and there was nothing I could do about that. In the same way, all the work I had to do was going to take as long as it was going to take. Attempting to fiddle with the formula wouldn’t help. If I wanted to do things right, like a strong cup of tea, there was nothing for it but to put in the effort and see it through. I guess, in this metaphor, “effort” is “tea.”
I realize that the comparison is a bit tortured. If you read the sixteen-year-old entry I linked to above, you’ll know that my first bit of tea-inspired wisdom wasn’t all that profound, either. But sometimes it’s not the bolt out of the blue, the apple falling on your head, or the enlightenment under the sacred fig tree that you need. Sometimes all you need is that tiny spark of realization to help you get over the next hump. And it’s better than just complaining about how busy I am, right?