Removing the science of daily beer

The main difference is where I keep tea and where I keep my coffee maker. My coffee cabinet is constantly flooding the products-ceramic casting suppositories, a piston brewer Frisbee -Magic, various grinders, Danish dive vessels, neoprene jacket and so on. My tea account, on the other hand, has only three brewery-A glass vessel with a filter, treated clay dish with a delicious network screen and a lid ceramic bowl, called Gaiwan, and one part of the same basic method: dive.

Why is tea in such a consistent style, while the market is overflowing with various coffee making products? The easy answer is that tea production is millennial practice in China, Taiwan and Japan, with long -functioning qualitative ideas that apply to farming, processing and preparation.* In short, tea guesses well. Coffee, on the other hand, has grown most of the commercial life in Central and South America, East -Frica and Indonesia, primarily for transportation to North American and European markets; This is an export production whose consumers have long been prioritized for cheap and high caffeine. Only in the last few decades has been the special main industry at all stages of the process, from the economy to the cup, which means that the same industry is still making new methods for cooking coffee every year. (I suggest more about the subject The atlas of the coffee world Written by James Hoffmann.)

*Tea grown in India, Tanzania, Kenya and Sri Lanka is less relevant to these qualitative ideas, as it follows a colonial plantation model for exporting, harvested and specifically exported to Europe.

The science of coffee making

At the same time, there are scientific reasons behind the varied approaches to coffee and tea. Most of the plant material in question leads to the composition Camellia sinensisOr the tea plant, on the other hand – and the flavors, textures and aromas that we try to free from each one.

Roasted coffee contains nearly a thousand flavors. About half is aromatic, mostly generated during roasting. The other half is soluble solids (briefly soluble), which are dissolved into the drink when adding hot water. In the wide category of solubles, we can focus on some main types: fruit acids; fruit sugar; caramelized sugars; and a group of 40-50 dry, bitter plant compounds. Each of its concentrations is determined by the type of plant from which coffee comes from, how and where it was grown, and the processing and roasting of coffee. Coffee cooking coffee is basically a controlled extractor of solubility, each of which is soluble at different speeds.

Imagine you are six years old and you want to make a big lemonade to sell it to your neighbors. You don't have much experience in the usual areas Limonade making operationsYou started with a jug of water. As it squeezes it into the lemon juice, it dissolves and distributes almost immediately with all its fruit acids and sugar. Then pour granulated sugar and sink to the bottom, where it takes some time to complete the completely. This is similar to what is happening to the coffee caramelized sugars. Larger molecules that are harder to break down but eventually dissolve. If you have added the lemon slices to the jug, you can discover that over time, some unwanted, bitter flavors – the varieties of most plants – will begin to leak into the mixture, but these flavors will also take time to dissolve completely and integrate to other drinks.

Similar processes occur when cooking coffee and keeping in mind the behavior of the components of the coffee can check how the finished cup taste affects the rate of dissolution. We do this with five main variables: the size of coffee and water and coffee maker, cooking time, water temperature and mixing degree. Lots of great “how to cook coffee” with guides, even try pour coffeeor the French press or sipon brewery– But only by discussing what happens when we add hot water to ground coffee, we can understand why tea is different.

It is important to note that only about 30% of the coffee is soluble; The other 70% is only cellulose and vegetable fibers. When the coffee is minced, we make tiny, uneven geometric shapes made from cellulose and fibers and with soluble material with soluble material. During drip brewing, the water enters the uneven surfaces, saturates the particles, dissolves it from soluble material, and then rinses the water that comes after it. Imersion Brewing works similarly, but is primarily based on osmosis so that dissolved coffee breasts from the inside of each coffee maker to the rest of the cooked coffee solution.

The coffee machine particles are porous; Their structure looks a bit like a sponge on which the small tunnels ran through. The extracted soluble material is embedded on the walls of the tunnels. In a sense, the extracting process looks like the Mine Cart scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Destiny when the water begins to chase them on the tunnels. The bigger the coffee particle, the longer the mine basket tunnel system in the coffee particle, and the more time the water takes to pass through and the solubles are extracted as it goes. If this helps you imagine Indy, Willie's tiny versions, and the short round that the cooking water chases in the coffee particle, then calmly.

Checking all five brewing variables means that you can extract fruit acids, fruit sugar and caramelized sugars from the coffee bed (ie the weight of a coffee machine in the filter), or reduce the brewing process before removing the dry, bitter vegetable material. You can try any type of brewery method – drip, immersion, a combination of the two – and as long as the brewer variables are balanced, the desired tasteful materials will be extracted into the cup.

The science of brewing tea

Tea is another story. THE Camellia sinensis The plant is a little more chameleon, in the sense that every tea style starts from the same leaf. That said like a coffee, What we taste in tea It can be divided into some main categories: polyphenols, amino acids and essential oils.

Polyphenols include grouping of various plant compounds, such as flavanols (and especially catechins) that contribute to the body and structure, as well as the general plan of tea taste. They are also responsible for the bitterness of tea. Amino acids, protein building blocks contribute to texture and delicious properties, and essential oils result in aromas and finer, more complex flavors. Polyphenols dissolve and extract quite quickly while amino acids take more time, but the essential oils here are bell: they are not really dissolved in the tea because the oils are not dissolved in liquid. We need enough time during the soaking process of water to break the leaf cell structure. This is what allows the release of essential oils into cooked tea, where they exist as an integral part of the tasting experience – although they are mostly floating on the surface.

This does not mean that all tea is the same: when processing tea, these building elements, which, according to our taste, are under great changes. The raw polyphenols in the leaf contribute to raw, “green” flavors, while oxidized polyphenols turn into more difficult, deeper taste categories. Green tea Producers try to preserve more of these raw polyphenol by stopping oxidation after picking; oolong tea Processing generally includes the bruising and formation of leaves needed for uneven oxidation to increase complexity; and black tea Production and leaf composition usually make up longer oxidation periods, creating richer colors and robust flavors. Many tea producers also set their business practice to change the construction of chemical compounds inside the leaves. Nitrogen -rich fertilizers cause more amino acid production in the leaves. The longer periods between higher levels of agricultural areas and harvesting allow the development of the high essential oil content of the leaves.

But virtually every kind of tea, Japanese Kabuse Sencha High mountain oolong from TaiwanThere is a need for a immersion solving method. Tea has to be arched because tea leaves give up the spirit.

In the final stages of high quality tea processing, the leaves are made, kicked and dried. This can be done in many ways, but with a few exceptions, high quality tea is usually completely intact and rolled into tight globes or thin strips. In order for the water to fully penetrate the structure of the tea leaf, it requires time and saturation. The leaves should be able to unfold and need the surface of the tea leaves to be exposed to steep water.

The easiest way to achieve this is to dive, which means that soaking is the core of the process, although different preparation methods are used depending on the style of tea. The Gaiwans-A is made for small, high-dose, high-dose, short soluble times for tightly rolled, globe-shaped oolong teas. Higher capacity standard teapots work well for thin, striped black teas and Chinese green teas, which are in longer, 2-3 minutes, so the leaves provide a lot of space and time to lazy. And the treated Japanese clayyusu vessels allow the preparatory to use low temperature water and rapid dissolution times, while the handle allows the gentle, rocking casting to quickly empty the teapot between the infusions.

Meanwhile, the structure of the drip tea cooking process can be used to extract polyphenols and amino acids, but tea leaves must constantly contact the water to completely release the essential oils. Drip Brewing uses a constant rinsing action and will probably not completely pull out the desired flavors. Apart from the use of a paper filter immediately eliminates what we usually taste from the tea taste profile, as essential oils and tiny particles are trapped in the filter fibers.

Looking through the spectrum of tea preparation styles, it is impressive that they are similar and how little the individual plans have changed over the last hundred years. The tea immersion process often does not respond to what kind of crazy thing they found; It starts on the farm and focuses on what a tea can offer and works to achieve a given taste profile. And sometimes, when I look at the strange Danish coffee brewer in the small, semi-placed ski coat or the aeropress in my kitchen cabinet, I wonder if the coffee industry can stand some more signal from the world and tea traditions.

March 2017