Friday, February 20, 2009
Posted by Miss Neddy at 06:42 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Black

In the West, there is the custom of drinking champagne out of ladies’ shoes (although it may be common on TV and in movies than real life); in Hong Kong, people drink tea that has been sieved through “silk stockings” (sī wà 丝袜). Unlike the Western custom though, the “stockings” aren’t real stockings; rather, they are long cloth (usually cotton) sieves which vaguely resemble silk stockings. And not just in shape; the infusion of tea through the sieves would render them a strong shade of brown, darkening with prolonged usage.

Tea dust (such as Red Dust) is very fine and cannot be effectively filtered using normal metal or bamboo sieves. So the tea dust is packed into cotton sieves, and water poured into the sieve to infuse the tea dust. Tea dust has the advantage of infusing very rapidly, so the water does not need to steep to become very rich tea. Tea dust is also fairly easy to dispose of, as one can just invert the cloth sieve to dump most of it out, and what remains can be washed off the sieve in a sink.

I’ve tried using the Aeropress to make tea from tea dust and it works quite fine, although I have to remember to use less tea dust since the water is pressed out more aggressively than a normal sieve. Normally the Aeropress is used for coffee, and does it well. I hate sourness in coffee and the coffee that is made with an Aeropress is famously low in acidity. It probably won’t work for tea leaves, but tea dust, being of a similar consistency and density to ground coffee beans, benefits from the pressure.