"Dog Ma 1" (reply w/o spam) writes:

What would make these measurements a lot more useful would be some
rules, however imprecise, for calculating caffeine uptake according to
brew temperature and steep time. A year or two ago on RFDT there was
an interesting thread ("Strong, Cheap, Black Tea") that made some
progress on this, but I think temperature was ignored.

Are you listening, Dog Ma?

[...how a chemist would measure, plus lots of factors in cup caffeine...]

Thanks! That was instructive and interesting, but I should've made
clear what I was hoping for: for a given tea, some kind of formula for
caffeine extraction in 2 independent variables (temp and time.) The
particularity of the individual type of tea would be represented, I
suppose, by some constant (factors?)

In a more or less unrelated note, since this post isn't yet long enough, has
anyone ever heard of white tea made by etiolation? (That's light-starving
plants to bleach them, as is done with asparagus.) Might be an interesting
effect. Especially since, or so I assume, many of the things we like best
about tea were put there by God and/or Darwin to keep animals from eating
the leaves.

Hmm, are you hoping for even more confusion as to the meaning of
"white tea" than there already is out there?!

Gyokuro is shaded for at least part of its life; I don't suppose that
qualifies, does it?

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html