Baisao wrote: ↑Fri Jan 18, 2019 12:02 am
Hmm wrote: ↑Thu Jan 17, 2019 11:46 pm
Just wondering for those who have TDS meters, or other ways of measuring water quality. When you pour water into an yixing without tea, boiled or cold, and then pour it back out into a glass vessel, is there a drastic change in the readings?
No change whatsoever in TDS.
Hmm wrote: ↑Thu Jan 17, 2019 11:46 pm
Do yixings change the water quality, or really just affect how the tea brews, and instead interacts more with the tea itself?
Various clays, not just Yixing, have an affect on the texture of water and also on the aromatics of teas. There’s lots of speculation for why this happens but little to no scientific explanation. Variously, people cite porosity, minerals, ion exchanges, magic, etc. but no one really knows precisely why.
So I found a cheap TDS meter, and I'm unsure how well it's working, but I just tried to test using the meter using boiling water. Not sure why it matters but if cold it reads at 90 only. But when boiled it reads at 255ish levels. I poured the boiling water into a zisha pot and it seemed to lower by at least 10% or more. If I use cold water (room tempish) instead, it seemed to increase by 10% or more, but that's after I had poured hot water into it first so maybe the pores were more open at that point? If cold water in a room tempish pot, the readings only seemed to increase a few points instead. Not sure if the meter is reading anything accurately but there does seem to be a change in the water for me at least n using a modern zisha pot. These test results were consistent as well for my meter after a few trials.
When you conducted the test did was the yixing you used high fired versus low fired, zhuni/hongni vs duan, etc.? Did you also try with boiled water to emulate more tea making? Perhaps with zhuni/high fired stuff, the TDS should remain somewhat the same versus other clay types.
How did you conduct the test exactly? Did you test it first and then pour it into the pot, and then back out to test again? Did you also test the water while in the pot?
Thanks.