This is the original recipe that I’m talking about.
Tea leaves: 12g
Lukewarm water: 50C/122F, 50ml/1.8oz
Cold water: 200ml/7oz
Ice cube: adequate dose
Brew it with lukewarm water for 10sec to unfold the leaves and to help faster infusing. Then add cold water with ice and brew it for 10 minutes.
Sometimes, I casually do experiments whenever I’m curious about tea. But, I notice that the conditions are not totally consistent through my tests or I get different results from what I expected. Then I realize how stupid I am, hahaha. This is the fourth revision of this article. This time again, even after doing many tests, I could not get satisfying results or reach an organized idea. Today, I just write about the two points that I learned from the series of tests I did.
First point is that you can shorten the brewing time to 5 minutes and cut down the leaf to 9 grams. Of course, the tea lose the richness that original recipe can offer but this mixture can still bring the full-sweetness that you can’t get with ordinary preparation. The tea is extremely mellow.
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Original
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New
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Tea leaves
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12g
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9g
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Pre-brewing
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Brew it 10sec with 50ml of lukewarm water (50C)
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Main-brewing
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200ml of Iced water
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10 min
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5 min
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Flavor
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Rich
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mellow
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The second point is that my cold sencha recipe is not always beneficial. When I tried my recipe with kabusecha, I found a significant difference from ordinary preparation. It is definitely worth to try. But, when I tried it with deep-steamed sencha, I didn’t find obvious advantage using my recipe. The tastes are different but the tea brewed in ordinary way is also excellent, which is bitter and refreshing. There might not be big advantage using the recipe that need a lot of time and leaves. My recipe is a method to bring out abundant umami, so it works better with tea that has a lot of umami, such as kabusecha and fine sencha.
If you are suffering from hot summer, try cold sencha!
My original recipe that I’m referring in this post:
http://everyonestea.blogspot.jp/2012/06/exquisite-cold-sencha.html
Common way of preparing iced sencha is something like this:
http://everyonestea.blogspot.jp/2010/06/iced-sencha-my-recipe-of-trial-and.html