Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 10:31 PM | Comments (2) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Other uses

Within the realm of traditional Chinese medicine, cold or iced tea is an abomination. It is said to harm the stomach (傷胃 shāngwèi) and to be injurious to the health.

Iced tea is generally regarded as an American innovation and is first recorded a being drunk at the 1904 World Trade Fair in St Louis, Missouri. The heat of the American south induced Richard Blechyndon to serve his tea poured over ice cubes, and in America, it is estimated that even today, 80% of the tea drunk there is drunk iced.

Iced tea breaks all the rules of tea drinking. The fragrance of tea is released by heat, and when iced, the only flavour that really registers is the characteristic astringency of tea. This means that in America, iced tea is more often served with lemon and sugar, and strong black teas are used because the delicate fragrances of green and oolong teas are more difficult to detect on ice.

In Asia (including Singapore, Taiwan and China) there has recently arisen a fashion for cold bottled green tea (of which one brand is “Oishi”). Most of these teas are sold flavoured with fruit or other scents because the characteristic green tea smell is much weakened by the temperature. A much better way is to make iced green tea yourself. Americans usually make iced tea from cooling strong hot black tea with boiling water, but with green tea, most people recommend using cold water to start with. This means using twice the usual amount of leaves and infusing the tea in the refrigerator for an hour (or even overnight).

I am no fan of iced tea. To me, this is the equivalent of batter fried fish. Tasmania gets some of the freshest, sweetest, tastiest fish in the whole world, but many Tasmanians still cook it English fashion: i.e., battered and fried until very very dead. Battered fried fish is lovely if the fish is freshly caught, and Tasmania therefore has some of the most delicious battered fried fish in the world; but fresh fish tastes even more delicious if it is grilled or steamed or prepared in any one of a million other ways. So why would you ever batter it and fry it? I approach cold green tea with the same sort of mind. Cold green tea is really only worth doing if you have a large quantity of fresh, intensely fragrant green tea leaves, because faded old leaves make bloody awful cold green tea; but you need twice the amount of leaves and they can only be used once; also, the fragrance is not as strong as if you made the tea hot. So why do it at all? Why not savour the tea hot and at its best? Why not fill your house with the smell of freshly brewed green tea, instead of sipping a weaker more insipid version from the refrigerator?

[Miss Neddy has to make a small disclaimer here: The opinions stated in this or other entries by her good friends are not necessarily her own. So there.]

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