botting your own tea?

I'd say you have a fair chance of it succeeding. You might consider boiling the bottle caps next time so you don't contaminate them by rinsing. As for the rest of your questions, well I just ain't got an answer for ya.

-Brett

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com (Mike Flaminio) drunkenly bellowed in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

Mike

My instinct as a professional microbiologist says proceed with extreme caution if at all.

Everything I have read about tea packaging has told me that it is a hot pack process anat it is usually pasteurized or loaded with preservatives (Sodium Benzoate). The big unknown is what is the pH of brewed tea. What makes beer so safe is that after fermentation the pH of beer is typically between

4.4 and 4.7, this combined with the alcohol and hop acids inhibits the growth of pathogenic microorganism, particularly C. botulinum the organism that produces the botulism toxin.

I have no knowledge or experience of the safety or efficacy of what I am proposing below but if I were to bottle tea this is how I would proceed. Brew the tea, sweeten and add lemon to taste, bottle and cap the bottles. Then using a canning pressure cooker process the bottles as you would for any low acid canned food.

If I wanted an "instant", ready to serve tea that I could make up rapidly this is what I would do. Make up a very strong brew of tea, add sugar and lemon and store in the fridge, this should last about a week. This can then be diluted to drinking strength pretty quickly. A larger quantity of the "concentrate" could be stored frozen for a greater period of time.

Be Safe - Cwrw-42.

JPittmanrn%cd.930$% snipped-for-privacy@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net10/18/04

22: snipped-for-privacy@mindspring.com

Wouldn't that imply a need for further licensing? You might not care for the taste, but you might very much enjoy drinking it.

Michael

Mike,

I believe that the biggest bottler of teas in Japan is Ito En, which has a store in New York City where they feature loose teas, not the bottled thing. Their bottled (plasticked?) tea is available around the city. I'm told that in Japan it's a vending machine thing to a large extent. Why not contact them and ask them? Who knows, they might give you lots of good information about production. You never know until you ask.

Michael

Thank you for your insight. While I didn't state it, botulism is my main concern. I didn't test the pH, although that was one intent of the lemon. I've got a quality pH test kit (designed for water treatment) for my aquarium. I could easily add lemon to reach the desired pH. Provided I maintain a good pH and pressure cook, would that be sufficient?

I'm not a canner, so I'm learning on this front too. What would be the best procedure for this? I thought when you canned jars, air was pushed out. What would happen if I pressure cooked capped bottles?

They may explode, or even more likely blow the caps off. Are you a beer brewer by any chance?

What I would do, is sanitize the bottles and caps using a high-strength brewer's method, probably using iodophor. This stuff needs to be rinsed like crazy so I would probably boil the bottles and caps. I would also boil the tea to make sure that it wasn't contaminated.

Then, I would proceed to fill and cap while hot to minimize contamination risk.

I guess you could do this canning-style by heating the filled bottles in a water bath then capping with (sanitized) caps.

I brew mead and soda using similar methods. I don't know how a yeast-innoculated fluid relates to a non-living tea though.

IMHO, this is a lot of work and I'd probably just make a big batch of concentrate and freeze it :-)

-ben

Well... you can pressure can low pH food (drink) and be safe. You'd need to try to find a pressure/time for your specific item. OTOH, if you drop the pH down enough (like jelly, etc), then the "boiling water bath" method can be used. It depends whether you trust your life to your pH measurement method!

Note... pressure canning is going to raise the temperature up toward

240F and it is going to be held there for a time, say 15 - 20 minutes. I really wonder how tea would taste after such treatment (most folks usually simply steep tea in LESS THAN boiling water, right?).

...

I've wondered this myself. You are correct that air is pushed out. However, commercial canners seal the metal cans before they are pressure cooked... so I suppose it might be doable with glass as well? If you do it, let us know... :) It'd be interesting to use this method to can things like juice, hot sauce, etc. in "beer" bottles.

Well, this is the next step if I can't bottle iced tea... hard iced tea. Either brewing or spiking.

Acutally yeah, I'm starting to brew my own beer. That's what I got me thinking about tea, my other favorite drink. I have a vision of grabbing a bottle of my favorite tea off the shelf.

So, are you suggesting putting filled bottles upright in boiling water. For like 10-15 minutes? Then capping?

Definitely don't pressure can capped bottles. I think the risk of botulism from bottled tea is probably negligible. There's just not going to be much nutrient in the brew. Also the tannins and acidity of the sugar will probably do away with any botulinum spores. Generally botulism is introduced as the result of soil contamination in vegetables, so again I think the risk is low. Go for it. It's more likely the tea will suffer from lacto infection than botulism. If you die, don't sue me, I ain't got shizz...

-Brett

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com (Mike Flaminio) drunkenly bellowed in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

I'd say long enough to get the tea inside up to as close to 212f as possible for about 10 minutes - i think that's long enough to kill anything in it.

True dat. Itoen is the oldest and biggest and probably least likely to let you in on any secrets because they're doing their best to break into the US market. Have you seen their site? Unfortunately they seem to sell some of the major teas that they have here in Japan, but they seem to offer quite a lot of US oriented packaging. Fairly fluffy. But I guess that is to be expected when your market is primarily composed of manga-geeks, samurai nerds, and health-food hippies. They have a haiku contest. Sad. I would rather see Coca Cola have a haiku contest and Itoen offer their super popular O-i ocha.

I think the packaging is more or less the same, squarish PET bottles, and similar labels. I was in Japan in March and noticed the tea vending machines *everywhere*. The biggest difference is that there are sugarcane (?) and other non-tea drinks in very similar bottles in Japan, while they only market the teas here.

I'm none of the market segments you mentioned (but I agree, they probably are the primary, "early adopter" markets), but I really love their teas. You don't have to be a tea snob to taste the difference between what they offer and the poor substitutes most of the others offer. Yes, Tejava is great (only $.99 at my TJ's!), but it's only black tea.

I actually keep two pitchers of tea in my refrigerator, that I make for myself and my partner: usually one's lychee black tea, sweetened with stevia, or tungting oolong (unsweetened), or sencha (unsweetened). We recognize which is which by color in the fridge now.