Common Water Mistakes and Their “Solutions”

Mineral drops (Concentrace)

Many people with RO or Distilled want to enhance their water, as RO/Distilled are too light for good tea, so they think, oh, I should add minerals. A product exists for this, called trace mineral drops, which promise to add OVER 70 ionic trace minerals! Wow, sounds great, right? Wrong. The main ingredient is concentrated seawater – it’s not going to make good tea. You will get really weird tea with this because it lacks the bicarbonate that forms the structure of good water for tea.

Solution:

Don’t use them!

Brita

Britas are very common and lead the market in home water filtration. They remove the chlorine taste of water, but do you know what else they do? They remove the calcium. And what do they replace the calcium with? Hydrogen. This acidifies the water. They don’t tell you this in the marketing as acidic water doesn’t sound good in a market saturated with alkaline water. But it’s true. If, you have a pH meter, try it out.

Solution:

I prefer undersink carbon filters like everpure 7CB5 which don’t contain any calcium-hydrogen ion exchange resin. If it’s all you have, though, you can have a fine experience with a brita. But it’s funny they hide the hydrogen acid weirdness from their marketing.

Reverse Osmosis

A lot of people use RO filters for their tea water. The thing is, this can be a disaster, or pretty good, depending on a number of factors. There is a HUGE difference between, say, 10 TDS and 0 TDS. If you start with hard water and your RO isn’t rated to remove so much of the mineral content, you can end up with anything between 0 and 50 TDS for example. So, there’s just a whole range of waters you can end up with. Those low TDS waters can be really nice and let those florals through while being smooth and light, so I get why people use them. Also, some systems have a calcite remineralizing filter at the end, which adds some good TDS to the water. I used to be entirely against it, but it really is an option, especially if it lets a little mineral content through. If it’s under say, 5 TDS, forget it.

Solution:

If it’s under 5 TDS, use something else. Maybe get a carbon filter like the 7CB5 and then blend it with RO to desired TDS.

Water With Electrolytes

Smartwater – purelife – essentia – dasani – these are all purified waters with added electrolytes. Now, you could say what I make in my water recipes is water with added electrolytes – however, I add them with a different philosophy and in a different way. These bottled waters are just throwing baking soda, calcium chloride, magnesium sulfate, potassium something, and then weird phosphates sometimes. They’ll hydrate you, but they’re not natural water profiles. You won’t find water with that mineral profile often in nature. The sodium, chloride, and sulfate are too high and I bet the bicarbonate is too low. I don’t like them for tea. If you’re in a desert, maybe purelife is ok. But it’s pretty sad.

Solution:

If you’re buying bottled water, you may as well buy a natural water that you like.

Storage

I’ve seen enough smelly berkeys, orange-and-black crusted brita pitchers, and jars of water with stuff floating in them to say Clean Your Containers and Refrigerate Your Water. All manner of life grows readily in water.

Solution:

You need to refrigerate containers that have been opened, especially tap water or spring water. Also, between filling a glass jug, give it a good cleaning with dish soap and rinse well. Plastic bottles make the water taste awfully plasticky if they have ever gotten hot, so keep that in mind too.

Water Update

So that batch of water from the last post? I had a couple teas with it, and two things happened – one, it outperformed my favorite spring water, MINISO from Mt. Palomar, California. Two, after sitting on silica beads for a few days, it reached 87 ppm silica!

There’s a way in which it was smooth and expansive in the mouth that I really enjoyed. The qi was working really nicely as well. We had WWSF 2011 Walong and then some nice Dayi.

Later in the session we had pu-erh.sk rareness 5 autumn gaogan, which really brought things to the next level. There was an immediate shift once we tried this tea, which was full of all manners of ripe fruit. I used crystal geyser water from johnstown, NY, which provided a heavy, lush session.

I’m amazed how my tea life continues to progress. I plan to make more batches of water as it seems to be in a way the best water I can get my hands on. There is no substitute for natural water but truly nice natural water is hard to come by unless you live near a spring or have a well. I live in NYC and have neither of those. It’s encouraging to be able to make my own water from scratch and have emotionally and sensorially satisfying sessions.

So I Made a New Batch of Water

If you’re new here, yes, I make water. Is there a better way to say it? Maybe – I create custom water blends from scratch. This means taking distilled water and adding the minerals one at a time. I’ve been doing this for years now! One roadblock I used to have was how to get silica into the water. Silica, or SiO2, is found in all natural waters, but is highly insoluble. I used to use waterglass neutralized with carbon dioxide to get silica, but it caused all sorts of problems.

Years ago, before a water blending hiatus (I still would try blends of bottled waters, but stopped blending waters from scratch), I was experimenting with using fairly pure silica gel beads to get silica. I had no idea if it would work, but I thought it would be possible from what I had read from old research papers on silica solubility.

Yes, the silica gel beads in the packets that say Do Not Eat. They’re not poisonous of course if they’re pure, but they can absorb water from your system and also explode in your body. Here, they’re not being consumed, they’re used as a source of silica to dissolve into the water. First, I rinsed them many times with distilled water until any impurities were gone according to a conductivity meter. Then I made my water blend in the usual way, except I stored it in a jar with the rinsed silica beads on the bottom. Silica gel is in a form called amorphous silica, which is much more soluble than something like Quartz or glass.

I feel like I should say I don’t recommend doing this! I don’t condone the consumption of silica gel in any way – I’m just sharing what I did in my own experimentation.

I asked gemini AI if this technique would work, and it said there was no way, it would take months to even get a measurable reading. I asked it to cite its sources and it gave a bunch of research papers supporting its claim that there’s far too little surface area, it’s not hot enough, and the rate of dissolution is too slow or even negative. Well, turns out the AI was completely wrong! It works extremely well.

Conductivity: 100

TDS: 80

Silica: 43 ppm

Ca:	12
Mg:	4
Na:	3
K:	1
HCO3:	51
SO4:	6
Cl:	4

Mahei 2016 with new water:

This is a 2016 mahei yiwu I got from a friend that is probably young plantation material.

Steep 1 opens with a grassy, citrusy sharpness. There is no astringency and the tea is silky and takes up space in the mouth. The length of flavor delivery is medium-long. On steep 2 I can taste the tea gradually move back through the mouth with a pleasant woodiness.

Steep 3 is round, has some fine astringency, very round, gelatinous like grass jelly. Some bubblegum on the aftertaste. The tea is very smooth and round – not a ton of high or low pitched notes, mostly mid. Great texture and easy to drink. Definitely some elegance here, which is something I go for.

Steep 5 brings more richness, woody and papery resins but with a good amount of body. Astringency is medium now.

Steep 6 brings a pleasant semi aged taste. I’m not sure if it’s the tea being plantation and light in taste and body, or if the water thins out by the end of the session. I should probably try a more serious tea.

New session!

White2tea Gaoshan Qingbing

It’s time to drink the long sold out budget aged sheng called gaoshan qingbing. This tea was always satisfying, and I’ve been storing it at 65% humidity so it’s probably in good shape.

Steep 1 opens softly, with leather, honey and camphor. The tea is very soft, and I must admit slightly flat so far. I would like a little more vibrancy. The qi is immediately very relaxing and enjoyable. Downward and comfortable

Steep 2: The delivery of taste is elegant, mostly low tones vibrating throughout the mouth. Very good mouth cooling on the aftertaste. Thickness is a solid medium. Plenty of bitter potency, low astringency. There is also a crisp acidity on the tongue. Overall there is an impression of woody fruity menthol coolness. You do really have to pay attention to notice the fruitiness though, but once your attention grabs it it’s obvious. Throat is very open and happy. Good for the body!

Around steep 5, starting to calm down into a woody experience with medium astringency. Not a ton of detail but enough to enjoy.

On the scale of bright to dark it was dark, but enjoyable. I have no idea why it turned out that way, but I’ll keep making new waters and learning through experience! The silica seemed to make things more round and elegant. It wasn’t a bomb of thickness that I was expecting, but it didn’t fall apart either. I’m left with a positive impression!

Water rating: 70/100

Water Stuff

I’ve been having some more tea with others lately – there’s something interesting about drinking tea at someone else’s house- it really breaks you out of some of your habits and perspectives, and you get to try someone else’s water! Everyone does something different, from filtration to mineralization to choice of bottled water. I have a friend who filters nyc tap with a berkey type filter, then adds salt and baking soda – something I never thought would work! Another friend uses Saratoga in glass for everything. I was using everpure filtered NYC tap, but have lately been using many brands of spring water and even blending them together. This brings me to a new idea:

There isn’t one “right” water for tea!

Is there a “right” wine? A “correct” beer? An “optimal” meal? Of course not! The variety of all of these is something we embrace and celebrate. I think for years when I was working on constructing my own water from scratch (which you can read about in many older posts on this blog) I was aiming for a certain perfect composition, one that would work for all tea perfectly. Now, I think this is a flawed way of thinking.

Each water has a certain character, or way of conveying flavor and texture, with different timings and dynamics.

Flavor: certain waters make sweeter tea, like icelandic, Poland spring origin/Saratoga. Some make less sweet, more austere tea, like trader Joe’s small bottles from the PA source. But beyond that macro level, there seem to be different balances of flavor and aroma and different flavors are brought out or revealed entirely sometimes. When tds is too low, you miss out on a tertiary taste caused by interactions between calcium and magnesium bicarbonates with the tea. In semi-aged puerh it’s a warm rich bready flavor (to me). This is probably the wrong word for it. Yeasty? Sounds gross but it’s not. Sweet earth-ish, a flavor you can really chew on. Using low tds like Saratoga or sant-anna, you get a beautiful clear taste but you do miss out on that extra richness. Some waters have 1/10 the amount of flavor as others. It’s striking.

Texture– speaking of, higher calcium-magnesium bicarbonate waters can have a more rich, oily texture. High sulfate low bicarbonate waters are drying and “grippy” like trader Joe’s small bottles. Trader Joe’s big bottles from Tennessee are much softer and thicker in texture, for example. Every water has a different texture – you can group them but they’re all a bit different. This is with tea, I mean. This whole post is about water for tea – water itself is a different story. It’s also true but in a different way. Higher sodium and chloride also adds body and expansiveness and makes the tea more “slippery”. Point is, different waters make tea with different textures in different ways.

Timings – some waters are very quick, the tea comes in, you get the taste, and then it’s done. Other waters form a ball in the mouth that slowly releases flavor/sensation/aroma. This creates a very different drinking/emotional experience.

Dynamics – the qi of tea definitely is affected by water. Both the amount and balance of minerals will affect the amount and character of the qi. Some waters allow you to have a consistent session with a tea from first to last steep – others will cause the tea to change flavor a lot more mid-session. Seriously!

It all sounds overwhelming!

Yeah, but it’s not meant to be reduced down. Tea reveals waters’ diversity and beauty. Water and tea help each other to speak. So, it’s just a natural variety!

There is no one right water for tea. BUT! Some waters are better than others.

“Some waters are better than others” is a phrase that suggests an easy, definitive “spec” that you would go for. But really, it’s just like tea, wine, music etc. – there are ranges of waters that are better or worse for different reasons, and will result in a subjective-to-arguably-objective holistic order of preference for different situations. It’s part of the art of tea I guess, how we choose different pots, cups, pitchers, chabus and build a map of all our tea experiences and memories.

–

I think the reason why water is usually overlooked is it’s seen as a problem to be solved. There’s a certain ennui to being like, goddammit I have to go buy some water filter, or minerals, or RO, or go spend even more money on bottled water which I don’t even know will be good or bad… but when seen as part of the exploration and joy of tea, it opens up a world of variety, trains your palate, and honestly makes you appreciate nature, as water is the fundamental natural substance that helps bring life to tea in the first place.

Articles I liked from Wooju:

https://vieillesvignes.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-water

https://www.listeningtoleaves.com/calibration

Callback to an old post:

2004 Biyun Hao Manzhuan with Fake Toronto Water

Tea Goals – Re-enlivening the practice

Since I began writing this blog, I feel like my tea drinking has entered a new phase. I’ve tried all the types of tea, I’ve tried so much water, I have all sorts of teaware, and I’ve enjoyed thousands of gongfu tea sessions. While in some ways I am not very experienced – I have never been to China, Japan, Taiwan etc., I feel like I am a pretty experienced tea drinker nowadays.

After drinking tea for a while, it can be easy to settle into routines, to literally “go through the motions” of gongfu tea practice. Grab a teapot, grab a tea, weigh it, load the teapot, do the session, dump it out, clean up, repeat. After a few hundred iterations of this, it can become a little routine – less and less exciting over time. I love tea so the practice never loses its charm, but sometimes it feels like I could have gotten / used to get much more out of my hour long sit. Luckily, there are all sorts of things we can do to prevent this deterioration and keep things fresh.

1) Getting new things

Change one thing about your tea practice, and you change everything. A new unglazed clay teapot makes every tea taste different and feel different to pour. A new chabu (tea mat) stimulates your mind and its associations to what you’re doing and feeling in a different way. Even a new waste bowl / jianshui sets the tone uniquely. A new teatable gives you and your guests a memorable setting for everything! So, you can always mindfully choose a cup or pitcher or anything that might make your sessions feel new and exciting.

2) Presence

Zen aphorism: if you drink tea, just drink your tea. Where I work, the tea room doesn’t allow technology at the tea table. When I’m home, anything is allowed, but sometimes I have to set the intention before the session to make this about presence, not about consumption or entertainment. For my sessions at home, the music playlist, cassette tape or vinyl record goes on, and the phone goes face down on the table, the modern gesture of defiance of being controlled by tech.

Then, it’s a matter of being present to my actions and sensations. The experience magnifies – what was once just abstractly/conceptually “drinking tea” becomes a living reality. There is so much going on at the tea table, it makes any possible distraction seem boring by comparison. There’s truly a universe inside each teapot, I mean, not to wax poetic, but you can’t get to the bottom of it. There’s really a lot going on and it’s constantly shifting and revealing new aspects. You miss all of that when you don’t pay attention, and the longer you pay attention, the deeper you go. The deeper you go, the better you feel, and the more likely you are to discover something you’ve never noticed before. Right?

3) Technique

I have to admit, even though I’ve made tea for a long time, because of the person I am, I can be a bit messy and inconsistent. When people do gongfu with a very defined sequence of movements, it looks flawless. I don’t really have that – I go by intuition, so things move around, aren’t set in stone, improvised, done in different orders. Perhaps that’s indicative of a sort of neuroticism. So, I’d like to arrive at a smooth and professional style of serving gongfu that still contains my personal essence. This is a very fruitful development in tea practice: discovering your way of serving and then codifying it into something you can follow consistently. Doing this, you can stop thinking about what you’re doing entirely, and then just move with the tea effortlessly. This probably looks really good and feels very satisfying. So try even writing down a sequence of events, like if/when you pour water over the teapot etc., and try it out/tweak over time until it solidifies.

4) Water (gypsum)

Water is crazy – want to revitalize your tea practice? Move to a new city/country. Everything changes. Water is the communicator of tea. Water expresses tea. The different mineral content and other aspects of the water will change how it tastes and how the mouthfeel is, for every tea you have. It also changes the energy and feeling of the tea. If you don’t want to move, try this little tip. 5-10mg of gypsum in your kettle will intensify and brighten your session, maybe revealing new flavors. Try it! Also, getting a good filter like an everpure will reveal more subtle flavors that were being masked before. Fresh!

5) Friends

Don’t be shy – have friends over for tea or bring your tea to a house party and set up a little tea corner. There’s something about opening up your personal tea practice to others that is very gratifying and helps you look at your own ways of enjoying tea with fresh eyes. When you have sessions with friends, let them make you a pot or two also. Comparing your tea practice to others allows you to learn so much about different perspectives and relationships to tea. Everyone makes tea so uniquely! You might say, wow this tea would never have come out this way had you not come over and brewed it for me. I appreciate this tea even more now. Thank you! Let’s grab some lunch, I’m starving!

Goals:

This is sort of a sixth idea, but also is an overall concept: it’s good to have goals for your tea practice to give it some forward momentum. They can be related to the five ideas above, but also to anything you can think of. For me, my personal examples are:

I want to be more present during my tea sessions
I want to improve my technique to make it more consistent and fluid
I want to test out my presence and technique in front of people and get joy from that

Some other hypothetical #teagoals would be:

make your water more satisfying / find a good brand of bottled water for special occasion tea sessions
find a new piece of teaware that resonates with you
learn how to experience cha qi more intimately
understand the general differences between puer tea regions and how they age
learn which teas will taste good to make for different people

So think about your tea goals! What do you want to accomplish to enjoy tea even more – how can you challenge yourself and strengthen your tea practice? How could your experience be even better, and how do you want to feel when you make tea? With these things in mind, you will have a better time with your tea.

Minimalist /// Maximalist

There are a lot of types of tea culture, and for me, I find all have their mark on my own tea sessions. There’s the gorgeous minimalism of pu-erh.sk and essence of tea for example, and there’s the direct maximalism of white2tea on the other side (at least in a lot of the art, as w2t is minimalist in other ways), the quality-focused community of teaswelike and daxue jiadao, the friendly fireside tea sessions, the spiritual global tea hut community, the edgy, music-focused kuura, and it goes on and on and on. After going on Instagram and seeing the way people are drinking and talking about tea around the world in so many different ways, the question is always, what am I going to do today with my tea?

As natural as just grabbing a tea and a teapot on autopilot and drinking it while doing/watching whatever is, I find the nature of tea to be an opportunity to set an intention, using tea culture as an inspiration. For me, there is not just one ideal. I can decide to put on Laraaji ambient zither music and have a very meditative tea session, where the tea sparkles in the light through the window as I breathe in the fresh evocative aroma of incense. I can feel my body relax as I seem to suspend time. Where did I get this from? Was it participating in tea ceremonies at Puerh Brooklyn? Was it from drinking tea with friends? Was it from watching pu-erh.sk’s stories and reading the half-dipper and mgualt doing the same sort of things? I have to say yes, it’s all of that and more. But this is not my only way of drinking tea, and it’s not the only ideal either.

Sometimes I have a very different kind of session. I get a loud, huge chabu I bought from white2tea, with art I really don’t intellectually understand, pick a rough-looking pot, grab a high end tea, grab a cassette tape or a phone and some headphones and just blast a playlist. Not ambient music – just my favorite music, anything. Intense, energetic, noisy, whatever I want. Time doesn’t stop, but it seems to melt, as one track plays after another, one pot after another, the teaware seeming to be the architecture of some nightclub, tea in technicolor. Where did I get this from? White2tea stories, of course — but it’s almost as if it’s something I would have done anyway, but also w2t gives me permission to do this and feel like I’m not the only one.

There’s also beginner’s tea – just the first gongfu puer sessions I ever did – it was just making tea in a quiet room, that’s it – no frills, no distractions, no preconceptions, no ideals. I remember how powerful those experiences were, and that’s still something I like to return to.

It feels like tea would be inherently minimalist, as it’s such a slow activity, but it’s really not that simple. Tea drinking is very fluid, and there’s maximalism in minimalism and vice versa. In a quiet, simple, low-stimulus tea session, everything is amplified, and the complexity of the tea is revealed. And in a noisy, musically and visually overwhelming tea session, everything blends into one seamless whole. I’m thankful for the tea community being so diverse, as it brings continued inspiration to my own tea table and to my life.

Water Review #10 – Sant’Anna

A HUGE HUGE HUGE thank you to sjt from https://therhymingleaf.info/ and Sara from https://italianteasociety.com/ for smuggling this water to me. Sara stopped by Puerh Brooklyn last Sunday to give me two 1.5L bottles of this water – a common water found in Italy. Water is heavy, so this is no small favor! Sjt has been working on replicating this water from scratch on his blog, which you should definitely check out. Amazing detailed explorations and experiments.

What’s interesting about this water is that it’s incredibly low TDS, at 22, but has been reported by sjt to have amazing aroma, body and texture. How could this be? I was very excited to try it, and it really delivered.

Untitled 03

7.2g 110 ml glazed pot

Electric kettle

Water: Sant’anna

TDS: 22

Ca: 3.3

Na: 1.5

HCO3: 11

Conductivity: 37 uS/cm

Silica: 6 (measured)

Arrives surprisingly deep and savory. Already really detailed in the middle and back of the mouth with big aftertastes and a sort of effervescence of flavors on the tongue. Whoa!

The taste is not too strong at all but is very present. It doesn’t attack the front of the mouth but instead hits the whole palate at a moderate pace, about 2-3 seconds after the sip arrives. I can already tell there is a balance here. It seems so textured and rich for a water this light. Compared to Poland spring origin which is more forward and front of mouth (still with body).

Steep 2: vivid, oily, citrus oils, wood oils pungency is there like bright hops (think New England IPA) what’s funny is I’ve had and made many waters that have this sort of arrival, but end up tasting muddy and flat – this holds up that structure without weighing itself down. But it’s not being too nice! The strength of a water like Truth Serum from way back in the early experimental days, so high in sulfate – there must be a good amount of sulfate in here doing its job to deliver plenty of strength and potency. Empty cup aroma is so nice, honey and flowers.

Leaves inside the teapot look happy. Always a good sign.

Steep 3- Really enjoyable and refreshing, full. You can taste the medium -endness of this tea, strengths and limitations. There’s a slight leafiness that brings it down to its level of $68/200g.

Steep 4- You can start tasting how lean this water is, as I’ve reboiled it a few times the texture starts to decrease a little bit. It still rings with very present flavor, very easy to drink, and the texture still holds together. I feel like I can taste layers of fine details. The huigan is ringing and buttery. Astringency is not a problem at all, less astringency than average.

Steep 5- Oily – it really highlights flavors you would usually find in a scotch, and I don’t mean smoky – I mean the alcohol-soluble fruits, peel oils, savory herbs, wood… But somehow here conveyed by water. Fresh and deep.

Steep 6- Qi is definitely there. I have a feeling that when the tea tastes good, it activates and allows the circulation of qi, as well as the focus and attention conducive to experiencing it. But anyway… The tea maintains great structure, tasting deeper into the leaf, as the high notes fade away to a fruit pectin and wood oil kind of experience. It’s sweet, not too sweet, bitter, not too bitter, has tannins, but not too much. I do have to say the arrival of flavor is much more immediate now; pretty much instantly when you take a sip there’s the citrus oils being presented. There’s a little peach juice too that comes later.

Later steeps- simply fades out elegantly. Some heavier waters make the tea go a bit off tasting in late steeps, but this water simply has nice, sweet, quiet late steeps.

From this session, I can tell – this water is definitely the type I look for, but on the lightest possible end of that. It’s amazing what it does with so few minerals and I believe everything here is in balance, with enough silica and good dissolved gases to be just as water should be. It makes me think my previous experiments are not too far off track. It’s just so pure and precise, and I love how it delivers every aspect of the tea. I’m very excited to try it with some mid-aged puers, like 2016 Treachery pt. 2, and also some dancong against nyc tap in a side by side. Thanks again to Sara and sjt!

Water Review – Experimental Recipe 9/8/22

These are some casual session notes for a water recipe I created as part of my ever-continuing research.

Calcium	14
Magnesium	3
Sodium	6
Potassium	2
Bicarbonate	51
Sulfate	12
Chloride	6
Silica	7

Major ions in mg/L

Tea Urchin 2019 LaoManE

It started out very fluffy and nondescript, and kept that throughout the session, and there’s a strong astringency throughout. However, underneath those there’s a fairly cohesive quality, although it lacks a solid present weight. It’s as if the astringency breaks apart the “ball” of tea that would be there. The astringency is good quality, but way too much. Anyway, underneath all of this is the beautiful citrus-spice flavor, with less bitterness than expected. So… where’s this astringency from? Signs point to potassium, as it’s very common for it to cause astringency, but natural waters with potassium don’t have such a severe effect. They also have different compositions, though.

The body of the tea is really nice, as well as the residual oils. The throat/bitterness is not great, though. It’s too candied and mild, I’d prefer some deeper yun and stronger bitterness from this tea. Why is the bitterness so low? There’s plenty of sulfate, so it should be high. My only explanation would be an excess of bicarbonate due to a measurement or calculation error. The bicarbonate could be eating up the bitterness and potency. The last possibility is the zerowater pitcher making the water alkaline due to trace NaOH. This would be solved by purchasing a good RO filter.

I came back to water chemistry recently because I’ve been watching so many chemistry videos on YouTube – I realized that although the chemistry in mineralizing water is fairly simple, the work itself, the trial and error, and the problem solving is very deep and interesting. Hearing stories from research chemists made me feel like I’m in the same boat – trying to accomplish a goal and trying different ways to get there, with no idea when you’ll find the solution.

2012 TU the orchid in valley

Really highlights the woody aspects. Initial taste was not a good experience but it grew to be more engaging with high quality rear tastes and deep flavors with a little heat and acidity too. Very pencil shavings-y. A bit juicy, which is nice. Could be 3x more though. Astringency medium.

2017 YS wild jinggu

Water diluted to 3/4 strength

Immediately smoother, round, still has a weird bitter co2 taste maybe? But a beautiful presentation. It sort of tightens into a slightly astringent finish when I’d like it to expand on release. Overall a nice session.

Some encouraging results! These sessions will give me a direction forward for future water batches. I’m simply enjoying the exploration.

Water Review – Untitled (New Version)

1 Liter of hand-crafted water in a beautiful glass bottle arrived at my apartment last week. This is the new iteration of Untitled by Arby at Empirical Water based on some of my previous feedback on the water. This new version was reviewed by mgualt here. You may remember my review of the previous version was very positive, but I later realized it could use improvements in texture to give a more natural and expansive experience. In the past months I’ve been working on my palate, trying many blends of bottled and filtered waters, getting a better understanding of the range of characteristics of waters for tea.

Fortune teller

6.8g 110ml glazed pot

Novak ceramic kettle

Water: Untitled

Steep 1:

Very substantial texture. A very oily steep. Tasting older than usual. Rich. Mushrooms, roots, herbs, mint, strength. Huigan (aftertaste echo on the breath) is sweet bubblegum and lemony root beer. Qi is warming and uplifting.

While I drink this, a huge, dense, dark thunderstorm started – I wonder if nature is mad that we’re taking over its job? Regardless, nature is making water too.

Steep 2:

A longer steep around 25 sec: seriously good delivery. Very detailed and smooth. Prolonged expression of flavors. There’s definitely a sense that this favors dark, sweet flavors, but does so in a satisfying, forward-enough way. Specifically, there’s a sweetness on the front of the tongue that is distinct and vivid, coincident with everything else. It’s quite fun to visualize where all the flavors and sensations are happening. Definitely makes the tea feel like a gastronomic event.

Steep 3:

Quicker steep, fairly buttery, a bit watery. Astringency is low-medium. Really long satisfying aftertaste and throat feel, and nice body feel as well.

Watery entry but with texture. It’s as if the tea creates a textural void which is then gradually filled with flavors. It starts with the root bitterness, then the sort of buttered popcorn and honey, then the light citrus and florals and herbs at the end. They are all present at once, but the focus shifts.

More bitterness, still nice rich oils. Still nice thickness but still has a watery quality, unlike really heavy waters that are all thickness and density with no refreshment or space. Simplifying in taste a bit to wood oils, like fresh oak.

Getting really woody now, and something that reminds me of lime jello. Astringency medium high.

Last, long steep

Not too strong, still nice layered mushrooms and wood and herbs. A bit less sweet, more dry in a nice way.

Trying a green oolong:

Leaf of the east dong ding in 100ml gaiwan-

It’s got a good taste of the roast and a good body and sweetness, but it is lacking that upfront fragrance and refreshing presence. Not the best fit. Still has a nice complexity to it, but a bit subdued. Still enjoyable.

Water rating: 8.2 – great for teas focused on richness and deep complexity, and usable across the spectrum of teas with what I would expect to be varying results. Really nice water that really doesn’t feel artificial. Nicely done Arby!

Water Evaluation – Wuyi Water

I recently completed a gallon of water from one of my water recipes, and the result is interesting! I designed it based on the mineral content that I could find of various bottled waters related to wuyi yancha, like Wuyi Nongfu. This recipe is loosely based on loose data, but follows some conventions. These conventions are a dominance of bicarbonate, low sodium, <80TDS, and medium to high silica content. This is also similar to what you might find in Seattle, but just a bit heavier.

This batch was double distilled in glass from bottled Poland spring water, with a bit of fractionation involved. Silica content is 8 ppm. The water was well aerated before bottling overnight and brewing the next morning. I made some Old Ways Tea Da Hong Pao in a glazed Jiri Lang pot.

Initial onset is sweet and gentle, with a lot of the action happening in the rear throat, mineral tastes. Texture arrives a bit thin but some structure builds on subsequent steeps. Aftertaste is very long on the breath. The water does not feel heavy, there is a refreshing quality. A lot of nice sweetness and very integrated roast with some fruit and toasty rocky flavors. Some astringency but not very much. With this water, the tea doesn’t burst with flavors, it calmly settles into them.

Overall, it’s a bit too veiled for me, but worth trying. I’d love to try some real Wuyi Nongfu someday to compare. I wonder how to improve this water – for now I’m not sure, and as usual will keep making different waters and exploring. There seems to be a few things in my water making process that need improvement regardless of recipe, so I’m looking forward to working on those too.