How to Cold Brew Tea | Don Mei

Hey teaheads. This is Don from Mei Leaf. In this video, how to cold brew tea. In this video I'm going to be explaining the cold brewing process, and brewing a couple of teas. This video is going to go under the Basic Tea Education playlist. It's also going to go under the TeaWares playlist. If at any point in time you enjoy this video then please give the video the thumbs-up. The more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way. If you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet then go click that button. Okay. We're in Oaxaca, in Mazunte. Beautiful, beautiful area of the world. Behind me is Memejita beach. It's breakfast time. We've just finished breakfast, and it looks like it's setting itself up to be another hot day. We're going to go and explore, and we want to drink tea. But we don't want to be brewing hot tea. We want to be carrying cold brewed tea with us. Let me explain the cold brewing process. The cold brewing process is very simple. You're putting leaf in cold water and extracting it at a very slow rate. If you imagine inside the leaf there are many compounds, many flavor compounds and volatiles, which extract at different rates. Think of it like a 100 meter race. Some compounds reach the finish line, i.e. they become extracted in the water before others. Now when you're brewing with hot water you're watching that race in fast motion. So the time difference between the first compounds being released and the last compounds being released is very, very small, which means you've got to get it right exactly with hot brewing. Make sure you stop the brewing process at exactly the right time to get the flavor profile for your tastes. With cold brewing it's like watching that race in slow motion. So the time difference between the first compounds being released and the later compounds being released is much, much larger, and that means that you have a big time window to have a flavor profile that you really like. Now the later compounds to be released tend to be the more tannic, bitter notes, or the catechins in green tea, and therefore cold brewed tea tends to be less bitter, less astringent. You can brew stronger. You can have more of the theanine, more of the umami, more of the vegetal notes. You can have more of the high notes and the fresh, juicy notes, but you don't have the bitterness and the astringency. So that's what cold brewing affords, and that's the reason why cold brewing is used predominantly in green tea. But today I'm going to be brewing a Taiwanese Amber Gaba. This is a Gaba Oolong made in Taiwan, and this is a black tea. This is a Ruby Black, or also known as Sun Moon Lake Black. Very, very lovely, fresh, vibrant black tea with lots of menthol, eucalyptus, and cinnamon notes to it. So we're going to be seeing how they shape up in a cold brewed tea. The way that I like to cold brew tea is I like to brew my tea hot first, just like I would any other tea. I drink my tea with my breakfast, and then take the leaf and put them into the cold brew bottle. I would then fill this up with cold water, put on the lid, and then I can walk around my whole day drinking through this very handy filter so I don't get the tea leaves in my mouth. When the water has run out I'll just fill up with more cold water. The reason why I like to brew with hot water first, well, there are two reasons. The first reason is I like to make sure that the leaf is completely sterile before I put it in cold water. This leaf is going to be sitting in cold water for many hours, so I want to make sure that it starts off as sterile as possible so it makes sure that we don't have any bacteria build up in the water. Some people brew tea in a style called Sun Tea Brewing, which is just taking cold water and leaf and leaving it out in the hot sun. I would not recommend you do that, because that really is encouraging bacterial growth. I think that the best way is to use hot water on leaf, and that way you make sure you've got a sterile product before you pour the cold water over the top. The second reason why I like to brew in hot water is it just speeds up the extraction process. So the leaf, especially if it's a ball-rolled Oolong, as in this tea, will start to open up much quicker. If I put ball-rolled Oolong over in cold water it would take three, four hours before I really get the flavor of tea. Whereas now, this ball-rolled Oolong, because it's been brewed already, is already starting to open up, so it's probably going to be an hour, an hour-and-a-half, two hours before I can really taste the tea. Right. We're going to pour cold water over these tea leaves, and we're going to go explore Oaxaca, and then we'll let you know how they taste. Hey guys. Welcome to Memejita beach. Beautiful, wild beach here. It's stunningly beautiful. The sun is about to set, and we've had an amazing day exploring Mazunte and Oaxaca, walking around, drinking our cold-brewed tea. It's just been the greatest way to explore and stay hydrated with delicious tea. So let me tell you a little bit about the tasting. I definitely prefer the Ruby Black tea compared to the Ambergaba Oolong. They were both good, but the Ruby Black just seems to be fresher and brighter. I think that fine-picked teas so buds in one leaf, or buds in two leaves, tend to be better suited to cold-brewed, because they just have more vibrancy, more freshness, than the Oolong teas. Because the Oolong teas have third leaves, and potentially fourth leaves, that have more starchy, buttery, rounded flavors, which are delicious for these kind of lovely, silky Oolong teas, hot-brewed, but seem not to be as well-suited to cold-brewed, where you want that freshness and brightness. So I prefer the Ruby Black. The Ruby Black has this lovely cinnamon, eucalyptus, menthol notes which are perfect, perfect cold-brewed. We've filled these bottles up at least three times a day with very cold water. I would recommend that you use cold water. If you use room temperature water, especially on a day like this when it's warm, the water will heat up too quickly, and you'll start to get a kind of lukewarm tea which could potentially develop some bacteria if left long enough. So I prefer very cold water, and I would recommend that you use very, very cold water. You don't have to use these bottles. These bottles are great, and the link to buy them will be in the description below, but you can use any bottle that you would like. You could use glass if you want to avoid using plastics. You could brew this in the fridge if you wanted. So very, very cold brewing that might take a bit longer, but you could certainly brew in whatever container that you would like. But these are very convenient because of the filter, so you can just drink throughout the day. The amount of leaf that you use? About one teaspoon for every 300 mil of water, so similar to western-style brewing. I really recommend that you do what I did this morning, which is brew hot water first. So one steeping of hot tea first, because it didn't take... it took less than an hour for these to start to develop enough flavor to where you could drink it as tea in cold water. So if I was putting dry leaf into cold water it would take two or three hours. This was just under an hour, and we were drinking lovely, lovely cold-brewed tea. So I hope that you experiment with cold brew, and I hope that you find some lovely flavor combinations and enjoy them. Please put them in the comments below so we can find out what you're drinking too. That's it teaheads. If you made it to the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs-up. Check out our playlists, and let us know if there are any videos that you'd like us to make. If you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares. If you have any questions or comments then please fire them over. Other than that, I'm Don Mei from Mei Leaf, saying goodbye from the most beautiful Memejita beach in Oaxaca, Mexico. Thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from the tea bags, keep drinking the good stuff, and spread the word, because nobody deserves bad tea. Bye.