Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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freshcup.com | May 2014 51 director at The Beverage Group, explains that, "Heat is energy that has been put into water. That causes the molecules in the water to move faster. The faster they move the more energy they have. The more energy they have, the more capable they are of knocking things loose from the tea leaf into the water." In a hot brew, the water molecules hit the leaves like wrecking balls, plow- ing away big and small molecules, and fast. Here in the cold brew, it's more like an archeological excavation, slow brushwork that only pulls off highly soluble compounds. "The carbohy- drates are going to come out into the water whether the water's hot or cold because they're the simplest," Fellman says. The water can also pry off some simple amino acids. What don't come off are compounds that add the deep and sometimes harsh flavors in hot tea. Polyphenols, for instance, cause astringency in tea, not a taste but that dry sensation you sometimes get. Caffeine is pure bitterness. Those classes of compounds do show up in cold-brewed tea, but at tiny fractions of their hot-brew numbers. That means when we drink the cold brew, the solution's chemical makeup is weighted toward the sweet carbo- hydrates and the umami amino acids, which in their variety and mix create a tea's distinct flavors. The astringent polyphenols and bitter caffeine can't take over the show. Cold-brewed tea is chemically different, if only slight- ly, from hot-brewed tea. t Samovar Tea Lounge in San Francisco, cold-brewed tea is integral to their menu. "Cold-brew tea is an opportunity to have a more sophisticated palate experi- ence," says Jesse Jacobs, Samovar 's founder and owner. Ever y night, before closing , a vat of cold-brew tea is prepared. The next day, after twelve to fourteen hours steeping , it's ready to go, kept in the fridge and ser ved without ice. Like hot-brewed tea, different leaves will require different ratios to water. There's not a lot of agreement on how much this differs from hot- brew ratios. Maria from The Tea Spot uses more tea for cold brews, while Jesse goes with less—just an indica- tion of cold brewing's newness. Bill at Tea Source runs a similar service to Samovar's, though with ice. The cold brew is a closing employee's responsibility. They fill glass gallon jars to the brim with water and then put the tea in a tea sack and hold the sack in place with the screw-on lid. Into the fridge it goes. "In the morn- ing we have beautiful cold-brew tea," Bill says. There is a downside to cold-brew service, Bill warns. The amount of cold brew you make is equal to the amount you sell. There's no concen- trate option, the way there is with regular iced tea, and jugs can bogart a lot of space in a fridge. Now that the weather has made its turn to warm and blistering hot is on the way, cold-brew tea's season has arrived, so try to make some room. Across the drink industry, this is the time we put down stouts and pick up pale ales; hot chocolate is replaced with apple juice; and red wines take a backseat to whites. Why not, at least a little, trade the warming, enjoyable astringency of hot tea for the crisp clean tones of a cold-brew. As Jesse says: "When you have artisan tea and you slowly extract the flavors, wow, you have a totally different game." ROSES SMELL COLD Virginia Utermohlen-Lovelace is a retired doctor and associate professor at Cornell University's Division of Nutritional Sciences and an expert on tea and taste. Fresh Cup wanted to know why so many tea experts described cold- brewed teas as having greater floral, fruit, and vegetal notes than hot teas. It comes down to volatility and cold receptors. "The floral flavors in tea come from a handful of chemicals, primarily geraniol, nerol, and phenylacetaldehyde," the professor wrote. "All of these compounds are easily volatile, while astringent and bitter compounds such as the catechins, and also thearubigin and the theaflavins, and caffeine are not volatile." A cup of hot tea, then, can smell fantastic as it brews, but by the time you drink it those notes have wafted away. "By contrast with cold tea, the floral compounds will still be in the liquid of the tea when you drink it." "The floral chemicals listed above activate cold receptors in the mouth and nose—roses smell fresh and cool [and] most of their major odor chemicals are the same floral chemicals as in tea. When activated, these cold receptors inhibit the function of the hot receptors, especially when what you are drinking is also activating the cold receptors by being physically cold. The net effect is that a tea when iced will tend to taste more flowery (and fruity, too) than its hot counterpart." A Now that the weather has made its turn to warm and blistering hot is on the way, cold-brew tea's season has arrived, so make some fridge space. May14_magazine.indd 51 4/18/14 10:45 AM