While I do a little bit of both, most large orders I place, focus primarily on teas that are less likely to become stale. These being Roasted oolongs, Black Teas, and of course Puerh Tea. While I say less likely to become stale, I do not mean you can abuse them with storage, I mean sunlight is still an enemy to tea, and so are strong aroma's.
But I did have the unfortunate happening of having roughly 40 grams of a Korean Green going bad. But due to the large amount of work I've had to do recently, I have been brewing tea a lot more in the lazy fashion. But I do not want to use premium leaf for this, I realized lazy brewed stale tea can sometimes be an improvement over brewing the stale tea in my typical fashion, ( a bit higher leaf to water ratio). While I still view this as a bit of a waste of tea, it certainly is much less of a waste than not drinking the tea at all.
So it seems sometimes a stale tea can have a bit of a second chance, as a tea to be consumed when you are busy doing other things and
3 comments:
Ouch. What was the culprit this time? It's always a difficult balance with the teas we think of as more special or rare because we don't want it to spoil but at the same time no one wants to drink it unless they can put in some time and attention to brewing it to its fullest. I guess I should be more careful with the Korean greens I still have left!
Nathaniel,
The culprit was a bad long term storage container, and while I was drinking it quick enough that it shouldn't have been a problem, I received many samples that captured my attention, along with getting sick twice in 3 weeks. Meaning by the time I got around to trying it again, it was stale.
I've had tea go stale because of poor storage too.
One thing I sometimes do with stale tea, especially stale black tea, is mix it with mint. With green tea, I haven't found as good a way to get rid of it. I've found that green tea, more than black, has a way of developing "off" aromas when it goes stale, whereas black tea just gets bland.
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