Alan Petrillo wrote:
>>> What teas have good flavor, but little caffeine?

Steven Dodd wrote:
>> It's mostly commonly thought/observed that white tea has the least and
>> black tea has the most caffeine. white -> green -> oolong -> then
>> either black or puerh tea.
>> I also found this page ... which thought these figures were all hooey.

Lewis Perin wrote:
> ... Don't believe that green or white tea in general has less caffeine,
> and don't believe you can extract nearly all caffeine from tea leaves
> with a 30-second rinse. It's complicated!

Yes, rather. May I suggest an alternative approach: find the tea that
offers the most satisfying flavor per gram of dry leaf, and brew it as
weakly as possible. To my taste, some oolongs and most whites give their
peak enjoyment when brewed so lightly that there is little or no color
to the brew. No kick-in-the-teeth flavor, but enough to balance the rich
aroma - right for sipping and sharing, not for bull-drinking.

An analogy is what happened when tobacco companies started selling
low-nicotine cigarettes. Most addicts smoke to a constant blood level of
nicotine (which isn't especially dangerous); getting there with
reduced-nicotine tobacco means inhaling a lot more tar, CO and other bad
stuff. So the health benefit was kind of reversed. In this case, the
opportunity is to achieve sensory satisfaction with the least leaf,
since all have (very roughly) the same extractable percentage of caffeine.

juliantai wrote:
> It's also important to look at theanine, caffeine and catechins in
> aggregate, they cancel out each other.

Err - let's watch the medical generalizations. They don't "cancel each
other out" any more than amphetamines and alcohol; they work together in
partially opposite directions, leaving plenty of side-effects. It may be
true that for some people, there's an overall uniform effect. But people
who are caffeine-sensitive will not be "saved" by those other components.

-DM