Willow & Everett Electric Gooseneck Kettle
The clever title is Ctein's. I'll list the links to all of Ctein's posts on tea at the end of this post. As you may or may not recall, depending on how long you've been with us, Ctein (pronounced "kuh-TINE," long "i") was the former longtime ~weekly columnist for this site; he departed in 2016 for a new career as a novelist.
Reader D. Hufford wrote yesterday, in part:
"I am going to go out on a long, sturdy, near unbreakable limb and suggest that changing from coffee to green tea is not gonna do an awful lot for your health."
Given the number of comments responding to my aside about coffee and tea, I guess I'd better explain this. I suffer from what I call "EMA's"—early morning awakenings. No matter when I go to bed or what other protocols I follow, I would wake up spontaneously very early, like between 4:00 and 5:30 sometime; occasionally I could get back to sleep but usually not. EMA's are ordinarily believed to be a symptom of mild, chronic depression.
It's been very persistent, and a real bother. Contrary to folk belief, you don't need less sleep as you age. You just get less sleep, and sleep more poorly, because of age.
Caffeine: friend or foe?
I've never drunk coffee after 3:00 p.m.—I learned way, way back that it would interfere with my sleep. Then I took to drinking coffee only when I got up in the morning and no other time. Beset with increasingly persistent EMA's, within the past year or two I cut down from two large (16-ounce/473ml) mugs of coffee per day to one.
Then I started on CPAP in August and started sleeping quite a bit better. I could get back to sleep in the mornings a bit more easily, and started actually feeling rested occasionally when I got up.
But the EMA's persisted. So I tried a number of things as experiments, one of which was switching to green tea. To my surprise, whenever I drank tea I either slept through the night (usually till 7:00–9:00 a.m.) or was able to get back to sleep after waking up early. And here's the kicker: every time I switched back to coffee for a day, I would wake up early the next morning. This happened when I switched back just for one day. Almost every time I drank tea, I wouldn't have an EMA the next morning—and many of the times I did, I've been able to get back to sleep.The correlation was not absolute, but nearly so.
So, Q.E.D.
I drank coffee more or less every day from age 16 (one-six) to 61 (six-one). But the time for that is over, so I'm leaving it behind now.
I went back and read over all the posts Ctein wrote for us about tea and brought myself up to speed. On his suggestion I went to TeaSource and ordered some green teas.
I've ordered this electric kettle (pictured above), which has a setting for 180°F water. I plan to use a 450ml Hario Cha Cha Kyusu "Maru" Japanese teapot for brewing one (12-ounce/355ml) mug of green tea at a time. The teapot appeals to me because it lets the loose tea and the water circulate freely together, and it looks easy to clean. I'll use my iPhone as a timer.
Bookin'
As for coming up to speed about brewing tea, I tried to turn to Scott Rao. Scott wrote a great book about brewing non-espresso coffee. It's called Everything But Espresso and, like some women I remember, it's short and sweet and hard to get. Highly recommended if you want to raise your coffee-brewing game. However, although Scott Rao admits in that book to being a tea drinker himself, he apparently hasn't written a book exclusively about tea. So I ordered his The Professional Barista's Handbook: An Expert Guide to Preparing Espresso, Coffee, and Tea.
Ctein on Tea:
The Art of Tea
The Art of Tea (for Two)...Pu Erhs
Teas, Please!
Tea With Jon and Bill
Oh, Tea!
Mike
(Thanks to D. Hufford)
UPDATE Friday evening: Wouldn't you know it, right after I finished this post, the teamaking gear arrived from Amazon (not even 48 hours after I ordered it, which, you have to admit, is good, given that I live way out in the sticks).
The presets on the Willow & Everett kettle make it obvious that it was made for heating water for tea and coffee. Some reviews say they don't like that the presets "limit" you, but I much prefer them, because now I don't have to remember which temperature goes with which kind of tea. I have a bad memory for numbers generally.
The Maru teapot with its strainer basket inserted.
The teapot is tiny, good for one mug's worth of tea at a time. (The strainer basket fits neatly right in the top of my mug, though, so I might be "skipping the middleman.") The "mug" in the background of course belongs to Butters, my faithful Attention Hound.
Load the strainer basket with loose tea...
...And we're good to go!
We'll talk about the new rangefinder in the morning. After I've had some tea.
UPDATE #2, Saturday morning:
As I mentioned yesterday, the strainer-basket for the Hari teapot fits like a glove right into my mug (it's in place in this pic). Since I'm only fixing tea for one person, and one mug at a time, I can't think of any reason not to brew the tea directly in the mug, as you see in progress here. By the bye, I've had that mug since I was nine—I bought it during a visit to Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, near Harrodsburg, with my Polk cousins and Aunt. The other thing I bought there was a sample of penmanship by a woman who gave demonstrations writing beautifully with a quill pen and inkpot, but that is long since lost.
The electric kettle works great.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Hugh Crawford: "I think there is an opening for a T-stop joke* here as you go from dark to light hot beverages so as not to lose focus on the nominal subject of TOP, but I can't seem to find the grounds.
*A new leaf joke would be strained I am afraid."
cathy: "Did you include decaf coffee or tea in your experiment? I'm wondering if there is something about green tea besides low caffeine that helps with sleep."
Mike replies: I didn't, no. For some reason I don't like fake or ameliorated or adulterated products; I don't know why. Decaf coffee just doesn't appeal somehow. I don't think this is rational.
Tom Burke: "Mike, I like the care with which you've approached your switch to tea drinking. I note however that you have not mentioned taking any advice from the greatest tea-drinking nation on earth—the British—and I think you're right to take this approach. As a Brit, let me explain the 'Way of the Teabag' as perfected in England.
"First, prepare your mug (not cup—none of that porcelain nonsense—you need a mug). The mug should be prepared by using it for tea-drinking for some time—a couple of years is fine—and never, ever washing it. Just running it out under the tap will do. You'll know it's ready by the brown stains all over the inside. Ideally, you'll keep your mug for years—losing or breaking a mug is a cause for genuine grief. It's a bit like losing a member of the family.
"Next, you need to prepare your drink of tea. For this you need boiling water, a tea bag, milk and a sweetener.
"The tea bag can be bought from any supermarket in the country. As for selection, the cheaper the better—don't bother with any of those fancy teas.
"Having placed your tea bag in your mug, fill your kettle from the cold water tap (don't bother with filtered water—spoils the flavour) and boil it. Make sure it really is boiling—let it do so for a couple of minutes. (In the case of an automatic kettle, this may mean holding the switch on when it tries to turn itself off.) Then, while it is still actively boiling, quickly pour the water into the mug and onto the tea bag until the mug is full.
"Leave it for a few minutes, to stew.
"Then, just to make sure it's strong enough, use the tea spoon to squeeze the tea bag against the inside of the mug. Doing this several times with considerable pressure on the tea bag will ensure the tea is strong enough. Discard the tea bag after this.
"Next step is to slosh a quantity of milk into the mug. By happy chance, removing the tea bag from the mug will have lowered the level of tea so that there will be room for the milk; if you want more milk than this permits, just pour some tea away. There is an art in this—the best practitioners let the tea run down the outside of the mug before dropping into the sink. (This practice has the added benefit of wetting the bottom of the mug so that when you put it down, e.g. on a table or a sideboard, it will leave marks on the furniture.)
"Stir in the milk with your tea spoon.
"Even at this stage there could be some genuine tea flavour left, and this will not do! Fortunately, this is easy to remedy—a saccharine sweetener tablet will do the trick. If you add one, you will need to stir the tea with your tea spoon again. (Actually, real experts don't bother stirring in the sweetener. Leaving it unstirred produces a mug of tea with increasing sweetness as you drink it because the sweetener will only have sweetened the tea at the bottom of the mug.)
"Finally, drink and enjoy. Delicious!"
Mike replies: There'll always be an England.
Ernie Van Veen: "To Tom Burke—have you been spying on me? ;-) "
