Temperature control, how do you get temperatures above 80 C?
When I pour water from my kettle to my cup for steeping, the water usually cools immediately from 100 degrees (rolling boil) to about 75 degrees, give or take depending on ambient temperature. The highest I’ve ever measured it immediately after the pour is around 81 degrees.
While this is fine for most teas, but for black and oolong teas the recommended temperature is much higher. So how do people steep these teas? I’m using an electric kettle so adding leaves directly into the boiling vessel is not an option. I’ve tried running hot water through the cup to warm it up but haven’t noticed any major difference.
Or, am I doing this whole thing all wrong? Is the recommended temperature for the water in the kettle before the pour? I mention this because one time I asked an employee at davidstea to fill my thermos with hot water and immediately after it was handed to me, my infrared thermometer placed the temperature at around 65 degrees. The water came from a faucet which he said is used to steep green teas, so I assume the water is kept at around 80 degrees internally but became 65 upon hitting the cup.
Did you pre-heat whatever you poured it into before measuring?
I have tried running hot water through the cup beforehand to warm it up, I couldn’t detect any significant difference.
But is it boiling water? Water from the tap might not be hot enough, if that’s what your using.
Preheating is a big one. If I want to get technical with getting really high temperature, I fill the teapot or cup with boiling water.
I then boil more water for the tea. Once that water is ready, discard the water in the teapot and cup and begin steeping.
Secondly, you should cover your cup or use the teapot’s lid to keep temperature from dropping too fast. I’ve got some ripping hot tea from not even preheating, but simply immediately covering the cup while steeping.
Finally, the vessel you are steeping your tea in could matter. Ceramic and Cast Iron tea pots hold heat very well. Stainless steel thermos’ do well, but I find need preheating.
In the end, you’ll have error and figure they would list the steep temp accordingly to what everyone could do at home.
Buy a personal sized porcelain teapot.
Pour a fair amount of boiling hot water into the pot. Put the lid on the pot and let the pot heat up for about 1 or 2 minutes.
Pour the water out, add the tea leaves into the pot and immediate add boiling hot water.
Put the lid back on the teapot and let it steep for the recommended amount of time.
I’ve tried pre-heating the steeping vessel. I kept boiled water in it until it was almost too hot to touch and I measured the inner wall temperature at 60 degrees C. There was literally no difference. Im pretty sure the cooling is happening in the air while the water is being poured rather than with the walls of the cup.
i don’t know how much it’d help, but given prewarming isn’t enough and something like a breville’s out of the question for you, maybe worth trying: some tea shops sell “tea warmer” bases, where you put the tea pot/steeping vessel on a stand over a tea light candle. another option maybe would be something like brewing in a thermos vacuum sealed tumbler with the top screwed on, though there are other issues then (getting tea smell out of the relatively-harder-to-wash tumbler, say). for a while before i had a way to keep a lot of water steep-ready-hot electrically i was using one for gongfu sessions (not steeping inside it though) and i remember testing the temp over time and it kept the water near-boiling (no cooler than 200F) for like an hour or more, something crazy like that, when prewarmed before filling with boiling water. lots of steepsters rave about how hot timolinos keep their tea when they’re on the go, so that might work.
and probably out of the question for you given what you’ve said about already using an electric kettle, aaaand i don’t have personal experience specifically, but people prize tetsubin (cast iron) teapots partly because they retain heat well, like cast iron cookware does.
and a really out there, overpowered possibility would be perhaps boiling your water in a sealed pressure cooker (they work in such a way that water is hotter than boiling inside), but i don’t recommend that—extravagant, a little stressful (while newer models are designed to be safer, PCs still require vigilant and cautious handling lest they explode scalding liquid everywhere), and who knows what hotter-than-boiling water would do to tea leaves or your teaware.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve never actually tried one, but I thought tea-warmers are for keeping already steeped tea warm for drinking, not for keeping water at steeping temperature. In any case I don’t think a tea-light is enough to raise water to anywhere near boiling. I suppose it could be used to pre-heat the steeping container but heating it from the outside would seem even less effective than running boiling water through the inside.
Golden King, you would be surprised. I have a camp “stove” for hiking that I can simmer veggies on, that’s powered by a couple tea lights.
@OMGsrsly, oh, that’s interesting. I’m not allowed to have candles where I live right now but I may try that at some later time.
If the water is cooling rapidly on the pour you room temperature is likely quite cold. Forgive me if my assumption is wrong. I grew up in house without central heat…rapid cooling was always a problem.
You’re probably right about the room temperature. I don’t have an air temp thermometer but it usually feels quite cold. That being said, I once tried making tea at a friend’s place and her heat was on with the room temperature being somewhere around 86 degrees Fahrenheit(sorry, switching units cause that’s the number I saw on her thermometer), and the cooling rate seemed similar.
I just skimmed through and wonder how sure you are that your thermometer is accurate? Some heat loss is to be expected but the numbers you are saying don’t make a lot of sense. Likewise, a pre-warmed vessel should see a difference in temp. That you don’t see much difference either way suggests that your numbers are inaccurate, possibly because the temperature isn’t reading properly. (How long does your thermometer need to be immersed to be accurate, how accurate is it anyway etc). My Dad was using the same thermometer in his oven for years and only when he bought a brand new oven did he learn that the thermometer was off by nearly 100 degrees.
yeah, i was thinking the same thing when i read the bit about the 86F room where the water dropped immediately to unacceptable temps. that…doesn’t line up with my own experience, at all, and i suppose these things can vary but the notion the water is instantly dropping to levels below 80C just by being poured, even in a room as hot as that, seems off to me. for me, boiling water takes significant time to drop that low (10 minutes or so at least) when poured into a cold teacup in a room temp kitchen (i used to use that method for green teas before i got a variable temp device).
Also, the OP is using an infrared thermometer – those do surface temperature for the most part.
The thermometer measures boiling water correctly at around 100 degrees. Water vapor evaporating off the top could be interfering with measurements when its in the cup I suppose but I tend to hold it fairly close to the water surface. I don’t really have another way to confirm its accuracy at the moment.
Nevermind, looks like you are right. I did a test where I hovered the thermometer over a cup of water I had poured then lowered it until it was slightly dipped into the water(obviously I wasn’t planning on using this cup of water for anything). When the thermometer broke the water’s surface the temperature reading jumped from 71 degrees or so to 85 degrees. Guess IR thermometers aren’t the best thing to use for tea.
It doesn’t seem possible that water would drop 20C just by pouring it. Even in a cold house it takes a while for my just boiled water to drop down to 80C.
Which makes me wonder: are you at sea level, or near it? Because if you are at altitude your water will never be 100C, not even when it boils.
From a quick Google, it seems my boiling point is somewhere around 98 degrees. Not quite 100 but close enough.
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