Lewis Perin wrote:
1) Even granting your assumption that all components are either good
or bad, why assume *all* the bad ones are slower to dissolve than
*all* the good ones?

Well, to be fair, I think it is a relatively safe assumption to say that
for a particular tea drinker, there is a combination of flavors that is
considered good. Call it a window, perhaps, of flavor.

3) I don't have measurements to back this up, but I think there are
lots of cases where greens yield up their goodness - and badness? -
along curves that are more complicated than you assume. That's why

I've found this phenomenon curious as well. However, I'm not willing to
give up and say that the diffusion process of dead tea leaves is so
complex. Rather, I think it has ALOT to do with the bitterness of the
tea (as served). A tea that is brewed with too much leaf can taste
bitter, brewed the same length of time as one with less leaf. I've
heard discussions in here about the differences in philosophy with
regards to time and leaf amount and temperature. I think they are all
important variables. But, I think that with any tea comes a level of
bitterness (good) that each individual is accustomed to. If that
bitterness is too high, or too low, the tea is no longer good.

Given that different temperatures and times can bring out different
flavors in a tea, a person who resteeps their leaf may prefer a lower
temperature; the different steepings taste different, which makes the
tea a temporal experience, changing with each cup, as the tannins come
out in different percentages. Note, some people will lower the steeping
temperature of later steepings to curb this tendency.

I hope I am not blabbering here. For those scientifically minded folks,
I am thinking about a diffusion process where the different constituents
of the tea have different half-lives, and steep out of the leaf at
different rates. Those "decay constants" vary with temperature, but not
so much with time, but as the leaf changes, the flavor extracted should
be different as different concentrations predominate the diffusion process.

For myself, I usually don't go beyond 2 steepings on the (green) tea I
drink, unless I am trying it for the first time, in which case I usually
two independent runs at high and low temperatures with small cups and
many steepings. I write down the dominant flavors, usually with some
sortof number to chracterize "how much" as I go, which gives me an idea
of how the liquor changes over time. I currently am pretty bad a
labeling the flavors to be consistent across teas, but I can look at the
data and get a pretty good idea of what I want to do with it when I
start actually drinking it.

Steve
(back from the dead)