Ripped on Tea

From the TGS archives, an article about tea and caffeine.

I frequently pass by a convenience store that boasts something called Hyper Bean, a coffee with twice as much caffeine as the regular stuff. This can't be a good thing. I think we have enough twitchy, ill-mannered people running around as it is.

But if you've gotta have your mega-dose of caffeine and you don't care for the likes of Hyper Bean, energy drinks or Vivarin, you're not completely out of luck. Tea is generally considered to have less caffeine than coffee but there are exceptions - sort of.

Matcha is a form of powdered green tea employed in the Japanese tea ceremony and now coming into wider use. Because it's powdered this means the entire tea leaf is consumed, as opposed to steeping the leaves in water in the standard manner. What this means for caffeine lovers is that matcha may pack a more potent kick than other types of tea. Experts love to point out that determining the caffeine content of tea is an inexact science but by some accounts matcha may have more of the stuff than the average cup of coffee.

Then there's chifir, a drink that's apparently popular in Russian prisons. It's really just highly concentrated tea that's been boiled to within an inch of it's life and made slightly more palatable with a good dose of milk and sugar.

Accounts vary as to exactly how strong chifir is and, given it's nature, there's probably no definitive answer. One source suggests that it's twenty times as strong as a regular cup of tea, while another reckons on twenty grams of black tea brewed in eight ounces of water. For comparison's sake, the recommended measure of tea for a standard six-ounce cup is 2.25 grams.

So it should come as no surprise when, in Vodka For Breakfast, the "quirky, existential thriller" by Russian writer David Gurevich, one of the inmates of a Russian prison camp who's hopped up on chifir, "stripped naked outside the barrack in the forty below weather and did cartwheels until the guards finally calmed him down." Don't try this at home.

Looking for more info on caffeine? Check out my book review of The World of Caffeine here.

Dying to know how much of your favorite caffeinated beverage it would take to kill you? Check out Energy Fiend's Death by Caffeine calculator here. Alas, there's no category for matcha or chifir.

Buzz, Buzz, Buzz

If you've read my blather before, you might recall that I don't do caffeine real well. Which is kind of a pain in the butt for a tea fancier, but that's life.

So while the rather caffeinated items in this entry are not necessarily too enticing to me, they might be to some of you.

For example, there's Bazza High-Energy Tea, which appears to be another entry in the green tea energy drink category. More here.

Speaking of green tea energy drinks, the gang at Steaz, who are best known for their green tea sodas, have come out with an energy drink. They call it Steaz Energy Organic Fuel. It contains green tea, yerba mate and acai. Find out more at the Steaz site, here.

I've heard of acai, but until recently I hadn't heard of chá de bugre, which is apparently some sort of Brazilian herb. It's also a component, along with yerba mate and acai, in something called Brazilian Body Diet and Energy Shot. You can check out their site, here.

Last up is a product whose name some might consider to be in poor taste. That would be Meth Coffee, which is said to be a "super caffeinated brew." No, we're not broadening our focus to cover coffee here at TGS. I only bring this one up because it contains yerba mate.

Image: Steaz

tea, green tea, food, food and drink, energy drink, meth coffee

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Decaffeinated Tea & The DeCaf Company

Looking for a really great decaffeinated tea? Don't bother. That's my recommendation, though you can certainly take it for what it's worth.

As one of those types who don't really react so well to caffeine, I'd be downright ecstatic if someone could devise a way of decaffeinating tea that wouldn't strip the leaves of their flavor.

The standard advice for someone who wants to decaffeinate their tea is to "wash" or "rinse" the leaves by doing a brief infusion - perhaps 30 seconds to a minute. Then throw out the water and brew your cup of tea.

Tea people tend to go on about this, debating the effectiveness of the process. Some swear by it, while others claim it's a load of nonsense and produce various facts and figures to back up their arguments.

My own experiments with the process have been encouraging, but I'm also willing to consider that it's a "mind over matter" situation or a placebo effect and that maybe it really doesn't work.

What I'm leading up to here is a press release I ran across today, from a new firm called The DeCaf Company, LLC. They describe themselves as "an advanced polymers research and prototype company that has invented and patented high-tech polymers."

The release trumpets "a scientific breakthrough that will allow coffee or tea drinkers to reduce and control the amount of caffeine within their beverages - all within a matter of seconds - and without compromising the taste and quality of the drink."

Here's how it works, or so saith the company, "The stirrer or cup is coated with harmless molecular polymer beads that specifically attract caffeine molecules. As the consumer stirs the beverage, the caffeine molecules bind to the MIPs-imprinted stirring sticks or MIPs coated sides of the cup, rapidly reducing the levels of caffeine within the drink itself. The longer the consumer leaves the stirrer in the cup, the more caffeine is removed. With just a few swirls, caffeine can be reduced to up to 70 percent in most drinks."

Well, we'll see about that, won't we? As much as I'd like to believe that the "taste and quality of the drink" won't be affected, let's just say that I'm cautiously skeptical.

Though I'd certainly jump for joy if they'd actually come up with a way to decaffeinate tea that wouldn't make it taste like it had been filtered through a musty old sock.

tea, green tea, food, food and drink, caffeine, decaffeinated, decaf

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Caffeine Reducing Gadget

I'll bet you didn't know the Japanese had a governmental entity called the National Institute of Vegetable and Tea Science. I sure didn't. Said department is described as a research entity of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization. I'm telling you this for a reason, by the way, and not just in the unlikely event that it comes up in Trivial Pursuit one day.

Apparently the National Institute of Vegetable and Tea Science and a Shizuoka-based machinery manufacturer called Terada Production have developed something called an LCT160001. This is a device for lowering the caffeine content of green tea. It does so by washing tea leaves in hot water to reduce caffeine by more than 60% and supposedly does not reduce the amount of catechin and amino acids in the tea.

Source: Japan Corporate News Network

tea, food, food and drink, caffeine, green tea

Russian Prison Tea

Ever thought you'd be busted for drinking tea? Well, you've apparently never spent much time in a Siberian prison camp. Recently Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once said to be Russia's wealthiest man and who is now doing time in such a place, was tossed into solitary for the offense of drinking tea in the wrong place.

Read all about it here, at Radio Free Europe's Web site, or at Toronto's Globe and Mail, right here. Pretty much the same story either place. Neither account mentions what type of tea Khodorkovsky was drinking when he was busted.

Chifir, Or Death By Caffeine

Here's a new one on me. Apparently there's a tea known as chifir that's quite popular in Russian prisons for the rip roaring caffeine kick it imparts.

I did some cursory research and found various recommendations on how to prepare this delight. One version calls for 1.5 ounces of loose tea to ten ounces of water. Another calls for 3-7 tea bags cooked in one cup of water for 10-15 minutes, then flavored with milk and sugar.

Sheesh. Well, as the old saying goes - don't try this one at home. Makes me twitch just reading it.

Book Review - The World of Caffeine

The World of Caffeine:
The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug
by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer

It would be nearly impossible to write a book about caffeine that doesn't deal with the three beverages/foodstuffs in which we most frequently ingest it. Those substances, of course, are c*****, tea and chocolate. So it should come as no surprise that the authors of The World of Caffeine have written a work that might just as easily have been called The World of C*****, Tea and Chocolate.

Weinberg and Bealer have essentially divided the book into two sections. The first deals rather exhaustively - and sometimes to the point of being exhausting - with the history of this holy triumvirate of caffeine bearing plants and their influence on human affairs. Part two takes a closer look at caffeine itself, including it's chemical makeup and its effects on human physiology.

Unlike a number of other books about caffeine this one pretty much takes the position that, when used sensibly, caffeine is a relatively benign and even useful substance. Chocolate, not surprisingly, gets the least amount of attention and it's c***** that seems to garner the greater focus, in spite of the fact that tea is said to be the most popular beverage in the world, after water.

Very informative, though a little dry in places. Recommended.

Energy Fiend & Death By Caffeine

Tea Guy doesn't spend much time reading other blogs. Nothing personal, but there's only so much time in a day. However, I happened to run across Energy Fiend the other day and found myself lingering for a while.

The site offers an appreciation of caffeine and energy drinks and whatnot. It also features Death By Caffeine, a nifty calculator that tells you how much of various caffeine containing products it would take to kill you, based on your height and weight.

As an example, it looks like I'm in no danger of dying from an overdose of green tea any time soon, since it would take 737.1 cups to do me in. Thank you, Energy Fiend, for providing such a valuable public service.