Greetings, greetings,

It's very interesting to read your description, and I must confess
that I hadn't considered the other components of the equation, taking
"oxygen content" as a common shorthand. It is of course plausible that
determining the effect on brew-taste of changing just the dissolved
oxygen content of the water suffers from a poor signal-to-noise ratio.
However, if this is the real point of the challenge-question
("...provide some convincing science to support the oft-cited "fact"
that oxygen in water is critical to making good tea"), then it is not a
little specious in its wording, one must concede.

Given that excessive boiling results in several chemical alterations
occuring simultaneously, no tea drinker could probably claim to be
truly concerned about the effect of changing just one of them - because
changing just one of them doesn't happen in the course of conventional
brewing. That is, *if* the chemical alterations are truly coupled and
are inseparable given the utensils and environment of the common
tea-house. In this case, it is not relevant to be interested in the
effect of variation of just one of these obfuscated variables - from
the point of view of tasting brewed tea, and is thus specious to
question "oxygen in water".

I'll be honest:

...it sounds as if a reader, who has invested some of their time in
understanding the physical process of water's chemical content, has
come across people discussing "dissolved oxygen" and wants to make the
point that it is a variable obfuscated by others. This is fair.
However, rather than stating this fact, the reader prefers to the
spectacle of offering his "best puerh", and saving the fact for later.

I'm fine with that, but it does seem a little tedious (and fairly
ostentatious).

You do contribute some excellent information, for which I thank you,
but it's dressed up in the language of pedantry, for which I cannot
thank you.

Keep up the good work, but do please consider a more congenial
approach. If each of us were similarly ostentatious about our fields,
it wouldn't be much of a fun group, would it?


Toodlepip,

Hobbes
-__-