Melting snow to brew tea?
I’ve had snow with Kaklua in it, and that was in the city.
Might try it if I catch some in a bowl.
I am going to try it this winter (assuming we get any real snow, the last couple of years have been a snow void) granted I live in Kansas City, so the distinct bouquet of pollution might make for an…interesting…brew
No, but I ain’t skeered of pollution. I make snow ice cream every time we get enough to scoop without touching the grass & leaves. :) I’ll have to try tea if we get enough this year.
I’m thinking I might just try it out for fun once we’re buried under snow. Boil it in my stovetop kettle and see what happens.
Snow ice cream is the best…and I just had the crazed idea to do Matcha snow ice cream ;)
Snow probably isn’t very oxygenated, which is usually what you look for in suitable tea water (among a few things [but it’s why you don’t reboil water]). Also yeah, it’s probably a bit similar to super distilled water, making it under-mineralized.
If I remember correctly, Lu Yu ranks snow last on his list of 20 suitable water sources, making it the least suitable of his 20 most suitable waters. There were also conditions on what teas pair well with snow tea (no fresh spring teas, but if the snow is stored until summer or so in a clay barrel it should be fine), and it’s cautioned that the snow not be ‘too cold’, as cold qi can interfere with the tea. I know a lot of this gets set aside in modern tea drinking, but it’s a thought.
I couldn’t find a reference to snow water in my edition of Lu Yü but I did find some other interesting statements on water while I look through it. He says to avoid water in which “the dragon may be sequestered”, meaning, according to the notes, that the water has lost its virtue. Interestingly, he also talks about adding salt to the water being prepared for tea. So adding some mineral content back in…Hmmm, I love puzzling out the information in the old books. Thanks for sending me back to Lu Yü.
Had to dig through my books to find the reference, but it’s in Zhang Youxin’s Report on Water for Brewing (also translated Zhang You Xin’s Chronicles on Water for Brewing), where he lists the twenty best sources of water but attributes the list originally to be Lu Yu’s. I’m using Warren Peltier’s translation, from his book of quotes.
I don’t find a straight-forward list in my copy of The Classic of Tea, but Francis Ross Carpenter’s is the only easily-obtainable translation of the book, and it might not be in his translation. Further, it could be that if it is Lu Yu’s list originally, it might be in his sequel to the Classic, which doesn’t have a readily available translation (Jiang Xing and Yi’s if you can get it, has mixed reviews, though it’s a more literal translation and still probably worth checking out, since they translated both the Classic and its sequel).
It may also be that the list was originally word-of-mouth and only formally written down by Zhang Youxin.
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