Your Kettle Is Too Hot for This Tea

I scorched a pot of jasmine tea once, early on, before I knew better. Poured the water straight off the boil, dropped in the leaves, and waited the way you'd wait for coffee. A few minutes later I had something bitter and flat, nothing like what the bag promised. I dumped it and started over, annoyed at myself for assuming tea was just coffee with different leaves in it.

It isn't. Green tea is delicate in a way black tea and herbal blends simply aren't. Boiling water, a full 212°F, is fine for an English Breakfast or a chai that needs to stand up to milk and spice. Pour that same water over jasmine green and you cook the leaf. The sweetness goes first, then the grassy edge turns bitter, and no amount of honey fixes it after the fact.

What actually works is water closer to 175°F, well under a boil, right around the point where the kettle starts to really talk but hasn't gotten there yet. No thermometer, no problem. Pull it off the heat a little after it starts to steam and let it sit a minute before you pour. Steep two to three minutes, not a second longer. Quiet Bloom, our jasmine green, is scented over the leaf across several rounds with fresh jasmine blossoms, and all of that work lives in the leaf itself. Scorch it and you've thrown away someone's actual labor for nothing.

I think about that more than I probably should, how much of what we make or sell is really just somebody's patience, handed to you in a cup. You can respect that, or you can rush it. Rushing it doesn't even save you real time.

It just means you drank something worse than what you paid for.

So: water below a boil, a little patience with the clock. That's the whole trick, and it costs nothing but two extra minutes standing in your kitchen instead of pacing around it.

Maybe that's the real reason I keep coming back to tea on the slow mornings. It asks you to pay attention to something small, and that attention has a way of spilling into everything else. Treat the leaf with a little care and you start treating the morning that way too, and the people you end up pouring it for.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective