Variety of tea with the most caffeine?

Hi all;

I've gotten a bit used to have very large bottles of diet pepsi when I have not gotten a lot of sleep the night before.

I was thinking that substituting tea for the diet pepsi would be a good move:

- tea also has caffeine

- tea is also very low calorie

- tea is also "sugar" free

- tea is not made with a truckload of toxic waste as is diet pepsi

- tea provides some healthy chemicals, like anti-oxidants.

- tea, even pricier tea, is likely to be cheaper than diet pepsi

I've heard that Irish Breakfast Tea has the most caffeine. If someone is looking for a tea to wake them up in the morning and clear their head is Irish Breakfast the best choice or is there a better tea?

Reply to
Steve
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black tea should have "the most caffeine" but caffeine content varies with production batch "irish breakfast tea" is a combination of some black teas for flavor purpose + usually to be combined with milk sugar and such dont know how the "healthy chemicals" fare when combined with milk, sugar, etc

other than that ... infuse your black tea for longer time, and drink many cups :) tea is not cheaper than pepsi

Reply to
SN

SN wrote in news:29151fbf-5582-4538-9bac- snipped-for-privacy@m34g2000hsf.googlegroups.com:

Actually, some tea is cheaper than Pepsi depending on your area and the sales going on, but those are the brands (like Lipton's Damnedest, a 100 bag box in American supermarkets only) that you wish to avoid.

Scottish Breakfasts are sometimes blends of black Assam tea (a province in India) specially chosen for brewing in hard water. Try that or CRC Assam. These are "milk teas", intended as mentioned above for milk/cream/half-n- half and some sort of sweetener.

The longer you infuse a black tea, the bitterer & more acidic it becomes, in general. (One exception to this is some grades of "black" pu-erh, for which see below.) Any milk tea does that.

Also, 100%-fermented black tea is only good for one infusion, driving up the price per cup. But actually, unless compelled by chronic lack-of-green, I think switching to tea from diet Pepsi is a good move, more than justified by taste alone as well as the health benefits (though you might find yourself missing the sodium carcinogenate and/or the partially de- weaponized plutonium at first :) ).

I believe that tea has other alkaloids than caffeine, one of which makes you calmer -- that's why jitteriness &c is more often found in coffee drinkers. Also, tea buds are higher in caffeine than regular leaves, so the tea highest caffeine may be a black with a lot of buds (e.g. a "Yunnan gold"), or a white picked the same way. There are defenders of greens and oolongs, as well. There are a lot of factors.

(BTW, black (ripe, cooked) pu-erh is really green tea, mostly from Yunnan province in China, which is specially processed to make it pu-erh. It is "forgiving" in the matter of brewing times, especially in the matter of bitterness (as opposed to green (raw) pu-erh, which is more demanding. The good grades are a real treat, although it is an acquired taste, like coffee. Also they can tolerate more than one infusion, like any good green or Oolong.)

Tea takes time, but it's generally worth it.

Ozzy

Reply to
Ozzy

The caffeine level in a blend (such as generic Irish Breakfast) is completely unpredictable.

Caffeine level in black teas varies naturally from below 1% to above

6%. Variation in the tea can be due to:

- Genetic history of bush - assamica can be 33% higher than sinensis

- Country of origin - some countries have a higher proportion of assamica - though now with hybridization this is less clear cut

- Seasonality - speed of growth influence caffeine level which tends to be highest in the rains

- Shading - can increase caffeine

- Nutrition - high N fertilizing tends to increase caffeine, poor nutrition to lower it

- Quality - clones are selected for cup quality which tends to correlate with high caffeine (in blacks at least)

- Processing - some aspects of processing increase caffeine after harvest (withering), others (fermenting & drying) decrease it.

Given the above factors (and their interactions) it takes a brave teaman to predict the actual caffeine level in any specific single origin much less in a blend of unknown origins.

Notwithstanding, the variation in the cup can also be due to:

- Average leaf particle size in your tea

- Size of your cup

- Ratio of dry tea to water

- Temperature of your water

- Time you infuse for

- Number of cups you drink

And we have not even considered other sources of variation in the "wake up effect":

- personal reaction to caffeine

- habituation

- subduing affects of theanine (and the natural variation of theanine)

- caffeine complexing

However if I were specifically asked to provide the highest caffeine tea I could find it would be a high value Rwanda CTC black Fannings or Pekoe Dust1 preferaby from Kitabi or Gisovu factories where all the tea is top rate clonal assamic types. In a rains grown Rwandan tea the level could reach 6-7%. "Creaming down" as tea liquor cools is the definitive test for quality in a black tea for UK blending (it is an indicator of high caffeine and polyphenol content - they form an insoluble complex that comes out of solution as the cup cools). For the better Rwandan teas even the waste fiber will "cream down" and has a higher commercial value (for blending UK style) than some of the best grades from other African and Asian countries.

Taylor's Yorkshire Gold has a lot of Rwandan and high quality Kenyan tea included in the blend.

Nigel at Teacraft

Reply to
Nigel

Nigel which Yorkshire Gold would you pick?

loose leaf tea bag 250g $9.5

40 tea bags $7 loose leaf tea tin 20g $11
Reply to
SN

Thanks for the good information.

About diet pepsi. I got started on that habit from the soda machine at work that sells tall bottle for about $1.30. I have since started picking up a six pack every other week at a drugstore for about 90 cents a bottle.

From some of the prices of quality teas I have seen on the web many be cheaper than 90 cents a cup.

Reply to
Steve

here is my two cents..

as said before, black teas generally have the most caffeine and also, I have found irish/english/scottish breakfast mixes to be the most potent. I believe there is a saying that the irish feel a cup of tea should be strong enough for a mouse to trod on. that being said however, it's hard to numerically rate one specific tea as having the most caffeine especially when you consider tea blends. There are black teas with lower caffeine content and ones with much higher.

there is a type of tisane called maté which is nearly equivalent to a cup of coffee in caffeine content. it is a different tasting tea, but if you are looking for the caffeine, you should try it out. you ca find it at trader joes, whole foods, and tea stores like TeaGschwendner and teavana.

I think tea can be cheaper than Pepsi, but it depends on what kind you buy. as said earlier the 100 count box of off brang generic tea bags will cost you maybe $4 for that same $4 you could probably buy 4 liters of pepsi.. so in that scenario i think the tea wins out.

but if you want to buy a high quality darjeeling or japanese green tea, you may spend $30-70 for 2-5 ounces of tea

Reply to
max.grady

Perceptions, perceptions . . . oit to n caffeine in Mate I would commend reading:

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Erowid gives range in Mate as 0.5 to 2.0%. I have found range in black tea from 1 to 7%. As ever it depends how strong you brew your Mate, Tea. or Coffee. In Argentina they put huge amount in the gourd but top it up for hours with water - on average, at 0.5% to 2% in the leaf, it probably comes out much weaker than tea made by one shot method.

With all caffeine intake the user generally quits when they twitch. Tea derived caffeine (due to polyphenol complexing and theanine balancing) can be imbibed at far higher doses before you twitch. A student of tea scientist Prof Spiro "once drank some 20 cups within

1.5 hours and then felt quite strange and light headed" but soon walked the effect off - I suspect that the same level of caffeine imbibed from coffee, mate or cola would milligram for milligram have more dire effects.

Nigel at Teacraft

Reply to
Nigel

. we buy 100 Green tea bags for 0.99 [at the Ninety Nine cents store]

i add ginger, lemon, and basil for flavor

waterboy

Reply to
WaterBoy

The caffine content of tea varies wildly and is rather unpredictable. In general, red tea (what we Westerners call "black tea") has more caffine than green, but there're some shade-grown greens that'll really wake you up, and equally there're some very gentle red teas you can drink before bed and have no problems. In fact, I pulled several all-nighters during exam week last semester drinking a greenish Chinese oolong. So, while reds will generally have more caffine than oolongs which generally have more than greens, it's quite impossible to say which tea "has the most caffine". Also remember that tea is a seasonal crop,

There is a fairly obscure southern Chinese tea, Liu Bao, which is traditionally said to be invigorating and energizing (according to Chow & Kramer's _All the Tea in China_, a source which has sometimes proved outdated and unreliable).

Interestingly, the polyphenols in tea act as relaxants, which means any tea will relax you while waking you up--it's very difficult (maybe even impossible) to give yourself "coffee nerves" with tea.

Irish Breakfast is a traditional name for a blend based on tea from the Assam valley, in India. Assam is known to be strong & stout, and usually drunk with milk. It stands to reason that it'd be the kind of thing one would want over breakfast. You might find better teas looking for Assam on uptontea.com (where I started out with tea) or specialteas.com rather than Irish Breakfast, since blends tend to be a little unreliable.

JB

Reply to
jade.gaiwan

All of these are true, but if you care about lower cost and fewer added byproducts, skip the tea and go right to vivarin. It's pure caffeine, obtained as a byproduct of decaffeinating coffee. You can also purchase caffeine solution for intravenous injection although it will require a prescription.

Irish Breakfast is a blend of different Assam teas, and the blend varies by manufacturer. You cannot easily say that one tea will have more caffeine than another without either trying or measuring them individually.

If you want something that you enjoy drinking, get a variety of different teas and try them. Upton's has some nice samplers that will give you a good idea of the range available. If you want a lot of caffeine fast, a handful of vivarin is a better choice.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Yow. One tablet of Vivarin is the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee. Try one, not a handful. Toci

Reply to
toci

In college a fellow named "Pigman" assured me that you can take up to five of them at a time without problems. If you want to take more than that you have to take them on a specific dosing schedule, taking only a few an hour, otherwise, as he said, "your stomach rots right through." I have not personally tried any of this.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

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