A Tea Addict's Journal

I’m currently on the road. The place where I’m at boasts that their tap water is great. Ok, lovely. I can taste the minerals in the water. It’s heavy. Boiling it in the kettle at the hotel, the water leaves a lot of minerals after even one boil. When I brew a lighter oolong with it grandpa style, it leaves weird solid deposits on the bottom of the cup. No matter, the tea tastes fine. Heck, it even makes hotel black tea bags taste pretty decent.

That is until I tried it with an aged oolong I’ve been drinking fairly often recently. It’s a roasted tea that’s well aged. It goes down pretty smooth, usually, with nice fragrance. However, I brewed this one cup in the hotel mug – and the tea, instead of its usual fragrance, smelled fishy. It’s the same kind of smell you get when you drink cooked puerh, except, well, it’s not that at all. I frankly was not expecting it, and tried smelling it a few more times. Funny enough, taste wise, the tea tastes about the same as normal. But I can’t ignore that smell – it’s so obvious and so offputting I ended up dumping the tea instead of drinking it further.

I’ve said it on multiple occasions – water, being the second most important ingredient in your cup of tea, is actually quite important to the quality of what you’re drinking. People often spend a lot of time and money on finding the best tea to drink, but completely ignore the water they used it with. Folks regularly drink with reverse osmosis water, or distilled water, or water that is just unsuitable for the tea in question – like this particular case of fishiness. If someone living here got a sample of this tea, they would think it’s awful and smell funny. Can’t blame them – the water here does make it smell funny. The tea isn’t the problem, but the water and tea combo is.

It’s just like when you use, say, silver cups to drink dark teas. The silver highlights the bright notes in the tea and mutes a lot of the deeper notes. That’s great for a green or light oolong, but is generally not ideal for darker teas. Unlike silver cups though, water is (relatively) cheap. Everyone serious about drinking tea need to be regularly checking in on the water they use, and make sure that it’s not doing funny business to the tea they’re drinking. I have, in the past, recommended using something like Volvic as a baseline. It’s still valid – Volvic is generally a pretty reliable water to test your teas with. It being widely available worldwide is a plus as well – people drinking teas on separate continents can compare notes.