Water Water Everywhere... What’s Your Water?

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teasecret
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Sun Jan 17, 2021 10:37 am

https://teasecrets.home.blog/2021/01/17 ... tap-water/

Replicated my tap water and did a cupping against the real thing! Learned a lot, check it out!
.m.
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Sun Jan 17, 2021 1:49 pm

teasecret wrote:
Sun Jan 17, 2021 10:37 am
https://teasecrets.home.blog/2021/01/17 ... tap-water/

Replicated my tap water and did a cupping against the real thing! Learned a lot, check it out!
Thank you for sharing. I enjoy reading about your research a lot. This is something which strikes me:
I really appreciate that my tap has good amounts of sulfate and chloride, as I can always fall back on it for a decent cup of tea.
Do you consider Chlorides and Sulfates as beneficial for tea? I'm probably simplifying too much since things have to be considered in relation to other minerals, i guess, but still, what role do they play? And what is the difference Mg vs Ca in your opinion?
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teasecret
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Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:19 am

.m. wrote:
Sun Jan 17, 2021 1:49 pm
Do you consider Chlorides and Sulfates as beneficial for tea? I'm probably simplifying too much since things have to be considered in relation to other minerals, i guess, but still, what role do they play? And what is the difference Mg vs Ca in your opinion?
Glad you found this post interesting!
Yeah, I've experimented with sulfate-chloride-minimal waters and then waters loaded with sulfate and chloride, just chloride, and just sulfate. It seems that sulfate has something to do with bitterness and rear-mouth/throat tastes, and chloride has something to do with clear, bright, sweet tastes. This isn't to say that you can just load up with salt and have hyper-sweet tea, it all depends on certain combinations and ratios that I don't quite understand yet. But this is the general trend. Yes, they're beneficial, although you can have a low chloride or sulfate and get away with it. It will affect the character - sulfate-free waters are unlikely to blow you away in the complex bitterness department. But you get nice huigan with chloride-heavy waters, so you'll get something back there nonetheless.
.m.
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Mon Jan 18, 2021 2:53 pm

@teasecret Thanks. It's all really interesting. I know that water heavy in sulfates is preferred in certain beer styles, perhaps for the quality of bitterness as you say. Yet both sulfates and chlorides were two things i always tried to stay away whenever i'd buy bottled water for tea making, and it looks like that wrongly. Who knows what i've been missing all this time. :lol:
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Gin
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Mon Jan 18, 2021 6:25 pm

Iron pill & calcium pill to enhance water for tea?

Thanks a lot for your help, everyone.
It seems that adding iron pill powder to Assam, Jasmine tea is indeed not a good idea (subtle bloody taste). Interestingly, it adds some amusing subtle notes to Puerh, cold brew Thai Nguyen fish hook, and cold brew Assam ( I mixed tiny bit of iron powder with hot water ,then put in tea leaves and immediately added cold water). Calcium powder not affected the taste of any teas.
Last edited by Victoria on Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Mod edit: merged into existing topic
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Psyck
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Tue Jan 19, 2021 7:08 am

Jack and Jill
went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water

Jill
forgot her pill
and came back with a daughter
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teasecret
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Thu Feb 04, 2021 9:31 am

Quick update,

The Truth Serum updated version as can be seen on my blog has been receiving a lot of positive feedback, some people saying it's the best water solution for tea they've ever used, and that it brings out new flavors with really good clarity. So, I'm really happy about that. Arby from empirical tea has even been sending around bottles of concentrate!

I'm still working with a lot of various techniques - going to distill water all in glass as soon as I can to see how pure-tasting I can get it. Additionally, I just received a bunch of higher grade minerals, which is nice. I also really want to finish the water guide, but life has me really busy.

Also, I recently discovered that a 60:40 blend of Voss and Acqua Panna is insanely good tea water. Especially if both are in glass bottles. It's probably the best tea water I've ever had. Very expensive, but well worth it for special sessions IMO.

/update
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LeoFox
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Wed Feb 17, 2021 11:30 am

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5380641/

This seems to suggest that lower tds is better at extracting catechins while higher is better at extracting theanine and other amino acids.

This observation is aligned with the following:

There are some other papers I've found suggesting optimal catechin extraction with more polar solvents.

Polarity can be expressed in terms of electrical permitivity, which is known to decrease with increasing presence of ionic compounds in the water.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.5169.pdf
Last edited by LeoFox on Thu Feb 18, 2021 9:48 am, edited 2 times in total.
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TeaTotaling
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Wed Feb 17, 2021 1:25 pm

Good stuff @LeoFox!
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belewfripp
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Fri Feb 19, 2021 9:48 am

I haven't had time to go through and read the entire thread yet, but I wanted to say I really love the research and information posted that I've read so far, especially the "recipe" for water from Empiral Tea's blog that Teasecret reported on. My municipal water is pretty hard, especially in the winter, but not necessarily with stuff that makes it taste good. I have a faucet-attached Pur filter that corrects that and produces water that works well with Chinese green teas and young white teas, but not so well with many others. I'd been experimenting with adding pink salt in small quantities to re-mineralize and that helped in some cases to soften the bitterness and astringency of some of my lesser teas (and which, thanks to this thread, I now know is owing to the chloride most likely).

However, reading Teasecret's blog entry on the "truth serum" (and then also the original info at Empirical Tea) made me decide to try my chemist's hat and make some custom water. I couldn't find food grade gypsum around here and the only magnesium chloride i could find was bound together with calcium chloride, so until Amazon gets here I'm testing a variant that is missing much of the sulfate and which is a little heavier on the chloride. I'm not entirely convinced one water can work for everything, as my experience is different tea responds better to different water, but if I could have some custom water on hand for teas that could use it, and crisper water from my Pur filter for others, I'd be pretty happy.
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LeoFox
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Fri Feb 19, 2021 10:28 am

@@belewfripp
Would be interested to hear your chemist's perspective extraction of catechins vs amino acids vs more lipophilic compounds that contribute to aromas, texture and flavors.

As for the empirical water, I think that would largely depend on a person's taste in tea which may not be aligned universally. No way, for example, would I follow precepts from a drinker of young pu or someone who prefers brisk black teas.
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belewfripp
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Fri Feb 19, 2021 1:43 pm

LeoFox wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 10:28 am

Would be interested to hear your chemist's perspective extraction of catechins vs amino acids vs more lipophilic compounds that contribute to aromas, texture and flavors.

As for the empirical water, I think that would largely depend on a person's taste in tea which may not be aligned universally. No way, for example, would I follow precepts from a drinker of young pu or someone who prefers brisk black tea
EDIT: Edited slightly in some places for clarification purposes.

Sigh. I wrote a lengthy and thorough response - and lost it because my login timed out. So, allow me to start again - I am not a chemist, merely someone with a general aptitude for science who still remembers at least a little bit of the periodic table and AP Chem from high school, lol. In the study you linked to, there are four cations (positive-charge ions) discussed, but no discussion of the anions involved (anions - and not dogions, as dumb chem teacher jokes might attest - are the negative analogue to positively-charged cations). This could be important, as there were likely anions of chloride, sulfate, hypochlorite and/or hypochlorous acid in some of those waters (depending on how the tap was chlorinated and if the spring water was). Additionally, not all cations affect water and tea the same - I'm rehashing other peoples' knowledge and testing here (Empirical Tea blog, Teasecret's blog and posts), but magnesium tends to bring out the effects of tannins while calcium brings out sweeter flavors. Sodium, from my own experience and what I've read of others' work, really does nothing except make it salty and potassium, also from my experience and others, makes it taste nasty. I experimented with potassium salt (KCl) yesterday and every tea was like sandpaper.

The tap water used in the study had 4 times the mg/L of calcium as of magnesium. Is that part of why it drew out much less EGCG (the catechin of which the pure and spring waters extracted significantly more from the tea in question) than the pure/spring waters? Could that also be why its amino acid profile was different? We also might want to consider other ions not even present in these tests, like cations of Ag (silver) that might explain why other bloggers in the past (like MarshalN) seemed to note tea using silver kettle-brewed water is crisper and sharper, traits many appreciate in a Chinese green (the other type of tea the researchers mention) or young white tea. And what would happen if we used a water with only 2-to-1 ratio of Ca to Mg? In short, I wish there had been more variety in compounds evaluated or waters considered.

From a statistics perspective, I'd also note that the error bars around the results for solids, theanine and caffeine content in several cases overlap or the end of one range is also where another begins. I'm guessing those are 95% confidence intervals (if the study notes this somewhere, I missed it) but most of the results in those three charts are not so different as to conclusively provide evidence in favor of different waters brewing different tea (and to the researchers' credit, they don't claim that they do). Of course, we all experientially know different water makes for different tasting tea. The question is - what's driving what? I don't really want to have to think about ionic concentrations while I'm brewing tea, but when it turns out nasty I like to know what caused it.

I also think the sensory notes need to be understood as both subjective and also possibly only relevant for white tea (or the specific white tea tested). The judgement was that the waters with fewer total dissolved solids smelled, tasted and looked better but what does that mean? Do these drinkers see a light or dark color as good, and did the pure water-brewed tea taste "good" or just better than that brewed with this particular tap water? I think the study shows these three waters behave differently in how they affected the drinkers' enjoyment of the tea, but whether they made better or worse tea is a different judgement. What I definitely don't think we can say (and again to their credit, I don't know that the researchers are saying this) that water with high tds universally extract less of the catechin EGCG - more that this specific profile of tds did. The results for caffeine are also odd as the highest tds water extracted the least amount, but the spring water had more tds than the pure and extracted the most. Potentially the spring water has other cationic or anionic compounds not addressed by the study? It does have a higher pH than the pure water, but then so did the tap water.

I think the study is interesting and does demonstrate different waters affect the same tea in different ways, but it's hard to go much further than that as two of the waters were almost identical in terms of tds, and the other two were near-identical in terms of pH. We know the two low-tds waters had similar performance in almost everything but caffeine and theanine extraction, but there may be tap waters with other compound ratios that could do better with white or other teas. It's also possible that there is an interplay between certain characteristics, e.g. perhaps high pH plus some but not many tds extracts more caffeine? In any case, I don't think it is as simple as high tds = high amino acid but low catechin/caffeine/theanine. In my opinion, more testing would need to be done (and maybe is being/has been done), accounting for and holding steady more variables while changing only the one thing being tested.
Last edited by belewfripp on Sat Feb 20, 2021 10:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Psyck
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Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:03 am

Let us all strive to feed and support the growth of Amazon so that it can spread its far-reaching tendrils to belewfripp's locale.
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teasecret
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Sat Feb 20, 2021 9:32 am

belewfripp wrote:
Fri Feb 19, 2021 9:48 am
I haven't had time to go through and read the entire thread yet, but I wanted to say I really love the research and information posted that I've read so far, especially the "recipe" for water from Empiral Tea's blog that Teasecret reported on. My municipal water is pretty hard, especially in the winter, but not necessarily with stuff that makes it taste good. I have a faucet-attached Pur filter that corrects that and produces water that works well with Chinese green teas and young white teas, but not so well with many others. I'd been experimenting with adding pink salt in small quantities to re-mineralize and that helped in some cases to soften the bitterness and astringency of some of my lesser teas (and which, thanks to this thread, I now know is owing to the chloride most likely).

However, reading Teasecret's blog entry on the "truth serum" (and then also the original info at Empirical Tea) made me decide to try my chemist's hat and make some custom water. I couldn't find food grade gypsum around here and the only magnesium chloride i could find was bound together with calcium chloride, so until Amazon gets here I'm testing a variant that is missing much of the sulfate and which is a little heavier on the chloride. I'm not entirely convinced one water can work for everything, as my experience is different tea responds better to different water, but if I could have some custom water on hand for teas that could use it, and crisper water from my Pur filter for others, I'd be pretty happy.
You can get food grade gypsum from https://puresupplementsco.com/ and other food grade stuff from loudwolf.
By the way, I also remember early on experimenting with potassium chloride and throwing it in the trash immediately. But now, a few years in, I really like potassium in extremely small amounts - it makes a huge difference. In most natural waters, you'll find it around 6mg/L or less, usually 1 or 2. Believe me, without that 1 or 2 mg/L, you miss out on a certain quality. It's not that it's nasty, it's just strong for some reason. To me, it helps certain notes cut through more, if that makes sense. It also lowers viscosity.
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belewfripp
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Sat Feb 20, 2021 10:19 am

Psyck wrote:
Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:03 am
Let us all strive to feed and support the growth of Amazon so that it can spread its far-reaching tendrils to belewfripp's locale.
:lol:

Great Cthulhu Amazon is set for delivery tomorrow. I'm not sure if I'm happy about that or not - I've heard many negative things about their work conditions and making people deliver on Sunday makes me a bit uncomfortable. But then, I also placed orders for tea from China a week before CNY, so obviously I'm not the impatient type. :D
teasecret wrote:
Sat Feb 20, 2021 9:32 am
You can get food grade gypsum from https://puresupplementsco.com/ and other food grade stuff from loudwolf.
By the way, I also remember early on experimenting with potassium chloride and throwing it in the trash immediately. But now, a few years in, I really like potassium in extremely small amounts - it makes a huge difference. In most natural waters, you'll find it around 6mg/L or less, usually 1 or 2. Believe me, without that 1 or 2 mg/L, you miss out on a certain quality. It's not that it's nasty, it's just strong for some reason. To me, it helps certain notes cut through more, if that makes sense. It also lowers viscosity.
Thanks - next time I will order through them instead of continuing to feed Amazon. Thanks for the info on the potassium chloride - I bought a whole shaker of it from the grocery store so it's not going anywhere. I will try adding a smidgen and see if I can tell a difference. I definitely had put in more than 2 mg/L when I tried it. :D
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