It’s All About the Green Tea

Whilst chatting with the Lovely Ladies, someone brought up green tea, and how amazingly good it’s supposed to be for you, providing lots of valuable vitamins, minerals and aiding weight loss (this is why they were so interested). Now I’ve heard all this before, and wasn’t very interested, but it’s amazing what getting married in 4 months can do to you, eh? So I suddenly remember that I had an awful lot of green tea and hadn’t had any for a while, and I like it, and we’d see what it did to me.

I drank two small pots ~2-3 cups per pot, and found my mind was clear, I was more alert, I concentrated better at work, and had a LOT of energy. In fact, two pots was too much, I wouldn’t sleep, wasn’t tired the next day and remained hyperactive until the following lunch.

Despite a lot of cheesy food, I also found I was looking slimmer. I wasn’t losing weight, but I wasn’t gaining it when eating irresponsibly and was averaging something lower than I normally do (all this is done with a mirror, not the scales…). So I decided green tea did work and was good for me.

But I’ve found this varies from tea to tea. The chua mee I have was very powerful, the sencha less so. Today, I have gone through my collection of sachets of tea and found all the green tea versions and brought them into labs so I can enjoy it there. I have green tea and lemon and green tea and cranberry, by twinings. Frankly, I prefer variations on just green tea, but I don’t want to drag the whole set of paraphanalia into labs. That’d just be silly.

http://i1.goodness-direct.co.uk/d/724301b.jpg

I’ve also discovered this little gem after a little googling on the green tea topic. You shouldn’t make green tea with boiling water. At 100 degrees, lots of the molecules which are good for you are deactivated, and can no longer help. This is similar to what happens when you boil vegetables and the goodness is leached into the water and poured away, leaving you only with flavoured stodge. Except in the case of green tea, it isn’t merely leaching, but the deformation or breakdown of fragile organic compounds. If, like me, you’re sensitive to caffeine, brewing repeatedly with one bag or one set of leaves is also a goody – the caffeine level drops dramatically every time you brew the same leaves. And since you’re not using boiling water, there should be a few brews in it.

Personally, I find that if you brew green tea too long in the same pot ittakes on a metallic, tinny flavour, which is most unpleasant, so I’m always careful not to brew it for too long. Diluting it after overbrewing doesn’t help. It simply makes the tinny flavour weaker.