What water you use to brew your tea has a huge effect on its flavor, as has been repeated ad nauseum in books and blogs as a source of wisdom, improvement, and importance.
And it does.
Spring water isn’t magical (so they say), but a proper balance of minerality, ph, and provenance makes a huge difference to the quality of our favorite leafy infusion.
So it should come as no surprise that the Tea Institute sources our own water from near by Roaring Spring, PA. Once (soon to be twice) a semester, a group of our intrepid researchers and artists ventures out to fill ~100 gallons of water. That’s half a ton if you’re keeping count. The Institute will use that in about a month and a half; not a very water intensive operation really, untill you think we’re ingesting the great majority of it!
Most of that water is simply stored and boiled with active bamboo charcoal from Taiwan. Our tetsubans give the water a slight sweetness (free iron cations bind with calcium which activates sweet receptors… so ghost sweetness… kinda…) and a more present clean mouth feel.
A small portion of our water is put into ageing jars for salt-ion exchange experiments; the aged water is amazingly light and airy. We can only age about 2 gallons at a time, and our current batch has been ageing for more than 4 months!
This is only used for the most special of tea!
Driving out to the spring one fine summer day, we made ChaXi in view of the spring and old paper factory that still bears the towns name.
We boiled the spring water with 3 pieces of our LongYan Charcoal, the aroma filled the air as we carried the jugs back to the car. With only a little too much work, the water was boiling in about 40 Minutes. Most of that time was simply getting the super dense charcoal lit! (it really just requires a blow torch a’la Stéphane Erler)
The ChaXi had a simple branch warped with a string of late bloom flowers, and I used my white porcelain travel set on wooden blocks set atop large green leaves. We brewed our ‘palace grade Dian Hong’ for such a event.
I would call this a success, but I’m still at 0 Okapi’s for Pennsylvania.
Looks like I need to step up my tracking game.
– Jason
