OK, here's a chance to marry two great tea traditions: the Chinese and the English.
Stop laughing!
But seriously, here's the problem. Often, when doing late steeps of a very good tea, I let it steep for fifteen minutes or even longer. The temperature in the gaiwan drops a lot by the end, and I know I'm not getting everything I could out of the leaves. So I'm thinking that something like a small tea cozy might do the trick. Anyone have any experience with this?
By the way, I'm aware of brewing in a thermos, and I'm aware of putting the brewing vessel in a hot water bath.
I don't use a cozy but I do sometimes drape a terry kitchen towel over a pot or whatever I want to keep warm (most often it's the french press for coffee...I'm not quite rich enough yet to afford one of those neoprene-swathed brewing carafes). It's not super insulated but it's better than nothing.
The problem of course is that the wet leaves in the gaiwan cool to the room temperature very fast after you drunk the tea from it that when you add even boiling water its temperature never reaches more than 160 in an average gaiwan. One way to get out more from LATE steeps is to fill the gaiwan with boiling water, pour it out immediately bringing the whole system temperature to high level and fill it with the boiling water again for the actual steep. You are not loosing anything this way precisely because late steeps are so "slow". I say if you still need a cosy after that, its one of two things - your tea is way above anything the rest of us drink or - you need to re-watch the "Scrooge" again! Knoweing you personally I know its not the second!
In Taiwan, when an aged or high-roasted tea (be it pu'er or other hei cha, old oolong, high fire oolong...) would yield no further significantly flavored steeps, the brewers would transfer the leaves to a glass kettle or enameled tetsubin and simmer the tea over the heat for several minutes. sometimes, they kept the leaves of all such teas after they were "spent" and simmered them together at the end of the day!
or...if the tea is very good, it merits a pot, no? it's easier to keep the temperature high in a pot by pouring boiling water over it...could work as long as the tea doesn't become too watered down from water intake in the lid. i know you wrote of gaiwans...
...despite your best efforts with a theoretical "gaiwan cozy", I would imagine that significant heat would be lost through the lid as to make your dainty cozy less functional.
myself, i would simmer. personally, i don't feel that a 15-minute infusions could do better than a good simmering.
if u make a gaiwan cozy, please post pictures! LOL
Alex Chaihorsky5cEqh.8835$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr12.news.prodigy.net1/15/07
00: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com
Lew's concerns about dropping temperature in long steeps is especially true with little gaiwans. I do the trick Sasha recommends, but still find that the fallen temperature hampers the extraction process. In Denmark during the Second World War people made rice by boiling the water, adding the rice and taking the pot immediately off the stove, wrapping the it in towels to conserve heat.After some hours, the rice was just fine to eat, and rare fuel was saved. So, the wrap it in a towel suggestion is also most likely good. In any event, should you go the cozy route, don't under any circumstances design yours in the form of a chicken, as we all know where that can lead. (If you don't know, you're better off for it.) Michael
[Jason]
[Michael] I don't think it's a matter of better so much as different. While I can't speak to the simmer issue, but will try it out, I know that many teas respond radically differently to lower and higher temperature steeps. Thus, I presume that a long steep of cooler water would yield up a different style than a shorter simmer. Only one way to find out though....
This makes a lot of sense, though I can't help worrying that the heating rinse you mention would carry off some of the, uh, zavarka built up in the leaves as they sat steaming, and gradually cooling, in the gaiwan. I guess that could be minimized by removing the lid immediately after pouring off a late steep.
Meaning that I haven't seen it the first time? This is true.
Right, that works, but what I was thinking about was for earlier in the process than that final simmer.
I'm actually skeptical about the merit of pouring boiling water over a pot. I believe Dogma argued here that the evaporative heat loss from the water, especially with a porous zisha pot, would cancel the momentary heating.
Who said anything about dainty? I was thinking of a cozy in the form of a bust of John Wayne. Or George W. Bush. Or maybe Mao Zedong?
I had the same worry as Dogma and for some time didi not pour hot water over the zisha pot. However I also noticed that very little water remains on the surface of the pot because of some kind of hydrobobicity of its surface. Some point about 3 years ago I got a very fast (tiny mass) digital thermometer and actually did some experiments. The results were that the best way to heat the chahu (during gongfu) is to pour boiling water over the chahu BEFORE pouring the water inside AND after. Also the pouring has to be longer than usual to be more effective (good 5 seconds). The effect of evaporating is minimal because of that "hydrofobicity" which is much higher in the good zisha chahus with slightly shiny surface rather than a "matte" surface.
An addition - Porous is not enough to get wet inside. If the pores are microscopic the material around it has also be hydrophilic,. i.e. "sucking" water inside the pores. Otherwise the surficial forces of water won't allow the "penetration" and the drop of water just runs off the surface, especially if it is curvy.
Lew, here's what I do: don't marry the Chinese to the English, marry her to a Russian (and I'm surprised that Sasha didn't suggest this, since he's in on the conversation): use a samovar. Samovars have a little teapot on top in which the zavarka (tea concentrate) is heated with the steam from the urn (in a modern electric samovar - if you care to risk carbon monoxide poisoning and potential lead solder leachates, feel free to use your grandmother's Russian heirloom).
I bought a smaller stainless steel pot at a Chinese grocery supply house (they came in a variety of sizes from about 6 oz. to a quart) which fits at the samovar's top. I use it for shu pu erh to which I keep adding boiling water from the urn. I don't dilute the pu erh for me, but do for my kids. Perhaps a gaiwan would fit there too.
This also relates to another current thread, that of concentrating tea. Russian prisoners, deprived of every other drug, notoriously drink large amounts of undiluted zavarka.
Best,
Rick (grandson of Zusel Chepelevsky, who no doubt would have been amused).
Hi Rick, who is/was and what is the significance of your grandfather in establishing who you are? I'm curious now.
[Rick]
As far as I've learned from my Russian side of the family, many Russians in desperate situations are pretty...umm...innovative with all things that potentially can make them high. This is not a an attempt to stereotype, of course, because I found that many Russians readily jump at outsiders who say "Russians are vodka drinkers" but can guzzle vodka themselves like there is no tomorrow. My bro-in-law, while in the notorious Russian army, ingested a lot of strange things to get high. Perfume, anti-freeze, etc...you name it, not to mention the free and abundant supply of ganja that grows/grew freely on the Chinese fields bordering Afghanistan.
[Rick]
[Michael] I won't bore you all yet again with tales of the Iranian deserts of ages long gone, but I will say that I've drunk samavar tea many a time on bitter cold nights, and it's the sugar lumps that make the experience. Zavarka, indeed! No truly excellent tea could ever go through that kind of abuse and live to tell the tale.
[R]
[M] Aha, Shu Pu'erh. Most will take any kind of abuse and live. For kids under six, diluting the Shu is highly recommended. Unless you want to take the opposite approach and give them a nice wad of chaw along with their straight up Shu.
[R]
[M] I rest my case. RIP.
Michael (grandson of Morris Plakansky, who would have been equally amused)
Sasha did not suggest this because he, as opposed to others here, knows how much rouble making samovar tea is if your house is not prepped for that (like having a special hole in your kitchen wall to which the samovar "knee" exhaust pipe connects, having the righ type of coal, etc. True coal samovar makes sense in two situations:
You have a well-trained butler or a servant
You have a huge crowd of guests who are capable, willing and ready to drink lots of tea. Otherwise - do not even bother.
I would also refrain from teh term "concentrated tea" for zavarka, because it suggests some process of making zavarka more concentrated. I would rather use something like "crazy strong, borderline poisonous" tea brew. BTW, Rick - what you called prisin zavarka (chifir) is not just crazy strong, its out of this world strong AND its also BOILED, as opposed to zavarka, which is NEVER EVER boiled. It is these proportions (100gram (3 ounces) of dry tea per 1 glass of water and that boiling that makes it almost impossible to dring for unprepared and brings its almost narco result. Classic chifir has to be made from Georgian (republic, not State) tea and preferrably packaged by Irkutsk (the town near lake Baikal) teapackaging factory. I guess they add more of the twigs in Irkutsk or do something elese, but for chifir Irkutsk Georgian #37 black tea is the king. But any black tea will do in absence of such. The importance of these details, however, can be really appreciated by a fact that Georgian criminals enjoy a special respect from general population of Russian prisons because "their land grows tea".
Alex (Sasha) Chaihorsky, father of Lena Chaihorsky, who is so much amused and delighted by anything tea, that she wrote an essay about it and got herself on almost full scholarship at Tufts for that)
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