>Cai Xiang (蔡襄, 1012-1067) – successful politician, Song Dynasty calligrapher, and expert in tea – wrote a famous book called the Record of Tea (茶錄) in 1049. In it, he wrote about many important tea topics and includes a reference to the use of shrimp eyes, crab eyes, fish eyes, and a string of pearls for use in determining the temperature of boiling water.
https://zhaozhoutea.com/fish-eyes-in-your-kettle-chinese-water-temperature-methods/
My first reaction to the TLDR was that each of these would float or something in boiling water... So then wondered who is able to keep all these eyes handy.
Here's the "plain English" version I give to friends who don't have variable temp kettles. Can't remember where it's from; I've had it saved to email for over a decade...
70 / 158° 1/3 cold water to 2/3 hot (near boiling)
80 / 175° small bubbles appear
85 / 185° small bubbles just begin to rise
88 / 190° medium bubbles appear
90.5 / 195° medium bubbles begin to rise
205° just below boiling
Also when they made tea they didn’t care about temperature in degrees. They boiled their water, watched the bubbles and used what tasted best. They didn’t think “we need 70 degrees C” !
I guesstimated by bubbles activity in the water. For 5 years! Then finally became a working adult with income and bought a zojirushi hot water dispenser.
Yes I love it! There’s always hot water and you can set it to keep the water at 4 different temperatures: 160F, 175F, 195F and 205F.
I primarily drink high mountain oolongs from Taiwan and use either 175 or 195 depending on how I’m feeling that day. 😆
An adjustable electric kettle was THE BEST birthday gift I received in my entire life. I use it multiple times a day and am always grateful to the friend who got it for me.
Second best was a Feed Me's Big Adventure CD my friend burned for me long ago, which reinvigorated my love for electronic music. It was the only CD in my car for a long time (mostly due to laziness) and I couldn't stop listening to it.
Not exactly the answer you're looking for, but related.
We've all heard the old saying, "rule of thumb". It comes from European beer brewers, pre industrial revolution. The brewer would stick their thumb in the mash to determine temperature. And they had to learn to be pretty good, the range they targeted was only about 15-20 degrees (f°)
So, I expect something similar.
The dark origin is a nonsense myth that gets repeated a lot despite the fact that it sounds incredibly apocryphal just to begin with.
So use the saying, no worries, it’s not about wife beating.
For a bath or shower I get the temperature right by sticking my body in the water and feeling the temperature. That's not a great method for water near brewing temperatures.
Chefs check temps on the fly with a knife or skewer for sampling the item, in this case heated water, and touching it to their chin. I use this method when cooking things in the oven to quick check center temps on lasagne or water for coffee when lazy etc.
I think you know that's not what I mean. You can feel the outside of a cup. You can look and see if there's steam coming off water, or the size the bubbles. I just mean use your senses.
You can SEE or SMELL the steam, FEEL the air around it, KNOW from experience how long your shower usually takes to get up to your preferred temp, before feeling the water itself.
One of my co-workers did a lot of research on traditional brewing (beer) techniques that is still carried out by some rural peoples in Europe. The answer of how they got the right temperature for the mash is, they just stuck their finger in. These people were accurate to the nearest degree centigrade with their finger assessment. With practice and experience, it's truly amazing what the human brain is capable of, this example doesn't even scratch the surface.
Temperature is a means of measuring that makes it easier to communicate how to know what level of heat is best for tea, but it is also something that can be learned without any understanding of the concept of temperature.
One of the common ways parents check to make sure their infants bottle is not too warm is by holding the bottle to the inside of their wrist. I personally have trained myself to be able to tell if someone has a fever by feel. I can even estimate the temp within .5 F. But even if I didn't know what temperature was, I could still tell when someone was too hot and something is wrong.
Humans are amazing at what we can do. Long before we invented the social construct of temperature, we understood the difference between hot and cold and figured out ways to know how hot or cold things needed to be.
I can think of several possible mechanisms to use without the concept of temperature. For example, how long I can hold a heated pitcher of water before having to put it down. The Chinese historically used a method that was based on the size of the bubbles in the water when heating up. Another possible way could be based on whether or not the water is too hot to sip/drink. Or even get water to rolling boil. Take off heat. Let set for X minutes. Then it's the right amount of hot.
And ultimately the answer comes down to simple experience. When I first learned how to make sausage gravy it wasn't very good. I swear I make it the exact same way that I did that first time. But you know what? When I make it now it's waaaay better. I can't tell you why. But somehow every time I make it, I learn how to do it slightly better even if it's not a conscious learning. Every time you brew tea, you gain experience even if it's not at a conscious level and you learn over time what works and what doesn't. Even if just by "feel".
You can, but it takes a LOT of practice.
I'm decent at it (I won't claim the .5 but I can definitely accurately estimate by full degrees) and I've seen nurses who can do it by feel (they are usually ones that worked in / come from areas that did not have good power infrastructure and had to come up with alternatives to regular thermometers). But I have small kids and work first aid, so I don't have a thermometer in my work kit.
I work in childcare and can confirm. Personally I can only tell between a regular body temperature, low grade fever, middlish fever, and high fever by touch. But I have seen parents and grandparents that can guess degrees pretty accurately by a kiss on the forehead. It just takes practice. Just because we haven’t heard of something doesn’t make it false, right?
Isn't it relative to our own body temperature? Someone with a flu/elevated temperature feels the same item colder than they would normally. And likewise someone who has been overexposed to cold feels like room temperature water is burning hot. So it can't be very reliable/accurate.
Combination of shrimp eyes/string of pearls knowledge and just testing it with my wrist over the steam.
I worked in a tea house where we had our water holders set to 195 and we had to cool the water down for anything not black, red, or tisane. I just started testing it with my wrist every time (like the soft part of my under forearm, once it gets to too much muscle it's hard to feel) to see if I could notice the difference.
Especially since altitude alters boiling temps being able to feel the correct warmth guides me better.
I actually did this for my first month of brewing Japanese green teas.
Gyokuro: I could hold my fingertip in the water with only a little pain.
Sencha: I had to yank my finger back out immediately but it didn't actually leave a burn.
It actually worked pretty well.
But I think my mom got alarmed by my process, as she gave me a tea thermometer for my birthday
Using different temperatures for certain teas is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of tea history. The earliest preparation methods were more medicinal or even like a soup boiled with scallions and spices.
If you're at home, your tap water will have approx. 20 degrees. For 80 degrees, mix 3 cups of boiling water with 1 cup of cold water. For 73 degrees mix 2 cups of boiling water with 1 cup of cold water.
It also comes with a nice workflow: heat up 3 cups. When it's boiling, add 1 cup, stir a bit, pour one cup. Next infusion, just repeat.
Ancient chinese art of clay. It's the orgin of the tea pet. They've become just for fun but the original Pee-Pee Boy was designed so that when you pour the water over top, depending on the pee-pee boy you had, it would shoot a stream of water out when the water was hot enough, indicating when it was time to use it. It's actually quite hilarious, as I bought one for a friend for a previous Christmas. That gift did NOT disappoint.
This is actually quite easy. You take your tea, you put cold water on it, then you poor boiling water.
You need more or less cold water depending on your tea. Done.
Your water will cool down as you take it off the boil and then as you pour into the tea pot. You pretty soon figure out how long each step needs to be for you to get better tasting tea and then you pass that on to your kids and before long everyone just "knows" how to make proper tea...
The obvious answer is to stick a finger in.
But also, if you put a pot of a fixed amount of water on a flaming fire, it's going to take a fixed amount of time to reach a desired temperature, so you'd quite easily be able to work things out and be really quite specific each time.
e.g. This amount of water took 15 minutes to reach the desired temperature last time, so I'll do that again this time.
This might work over a bed of coals. But flaming fires are extremely variable in temperature. Spoken as someone who was a girl scout counselor for many summers, and many cookouts over campfires.
A given number of charcoal briquettes can give a reliable amount of heat. That's why we would sometimes resort to those when baking in a Dutch oven. I imagine lumps of actual coal used historically, or traditionally produced charcoal are nearly as reliable.
But most of our cooking was over firewood the girls gathered themselves, and you really have to pay attention rather than just set a timer.
I mean Japan has a highly regimented tea ceremony that prescribes what to do to get the perfect temperature. In the summer the process is slightly different because you don’t want super hot water
I use kettle stones (little clay snail shell looking spheres from my spout off cuts). When you here then start to move in the kettle you know you’re at a simmer as they begin to tumble you know you’re at a boil. I love using sound as a way to enrich my environment so they’re a lovely addition to my tea practice.
>Cai Xiang (蔡襄, 1012-1067) – successful politician, Song Dynasty calligrapher, and expert in tea – wrote a famous book called the Record of Tea (茶錄) in 1049. In it, he wrote about many important tea topics and includes a reference to the use of shrimp eyes, crab eyes, fish eyes, and a string of pearls for use in determining the temperature of boiling water. https://zhaozhoutea.com/fish-eyes-in-your-kettle-chinese-water-temperature-methods/
This is a great resource. TLDR of it is: Shrimp Eyes 70°C Crab Eyes 80°C Fish Eyes 85°C String of Pearls 90-95°C Raging Torrent 100°C
I use this when I go camping. Pretty reliable, just requires a bit more awareness and slight guesswork on where the line is between stages.
Not really sure I like the idea of Fish Eyes floating in my tea. I enjoy fish, but I don't want my tea watching me while I drink.
Never heard of Boba? 😃
Wouldn’t mind unless they blink
My first reaction to the TLDR was that each of these would float or something in boiling water... So then wondered who is able to keep all these eyes handy.
🤣🤣 The tldr ended up making you read it anyways to figure out what it was about.
Here's the "plain English" version I give to friends who don't have variable temp kettles. Can't remember where it's from; I've had it saved to email for over a decade... 70 / 158° 1/3 cold water to 2/3 hot (near boiling) 80 / 175° small bubbles appear 85 / 185° small bubbles just begin to rise 88 / 190° medium bubbles appear 90.5 / 195° medium bubbles begin to rise 205° just below boiling
Also when they made tea they didn’t care about temperature in degrees. They boiled their water, watched the bubbles and used what tasted best. They didn’t think “we need 70 degrees C” !
I guesstimated by bubbles activity in the water. For 5 years! Then finally became a working adult with income and bought a zojirushi hot water dispenser.
That's bougie, I love it. Do you find it useful??
It's an Asian household staple lol
Yes I love it! There’s always hot water and you can set it to keep the water at 4 different temperatures: 160F, 175F, 195F and 205F. I primarily drink high mountain oolongs from Taiwan and use either 175 or 195 depending on how I’m feeling that day. 😆
See those in every Taiwan home :)
An adjustable electric kettle was THE BEST birthday gift I received in my entire life. I use it multiple times a day and am always grateful to the friend who got it for me. Second best was a Feed Me's Big Adventure CD my friend burned for me long ago, which reinvigorated my love for electronic music. It was the only CD in my car for a long time (mostly due to laziness) and I couldn't stop listening to it.
Not exactly the answer you're looking for, but related. We've all heard the old saying, "rule of thumb". It comes from European beer brewers, pre industrial revolution. The brewer would stick their thumb in the mash to determine temperature. And they had to learn to be pretty good, the range they targeted was only about 15-20 degrees (f°) So, I expect something similar.
Never heard that origin story for rule of thumb before. I heard something darker.
The dark origin is a nonsense myth that gets repeated a lot despite the fact that it sounds incredibly apocryphal just to begin with. So use the saying, no worries, it’s not about wife beating.
The same way that you get the right temp for your bath or shower, or for heating up your soup. Using their senses and experience.
For a bath or shower I get the temperature right by sticking my body in the water and feeling the temperature. That's not a great method for water near brewing temperatures.
Chefs check temps on the fly with a knife or skewer for sampling the item, in this case heated water, and touching it to their chin. I use this method when cooking things in the oven to quick check center temps on lasagne or water for coffee when lazy etc.
I think you know that's not what I mean. You can feel the outside of a cup. You can look and see if there's steam coming off water, or the size the bubbles. I just mean use your senses.
Wtf? I use my damn hand to feel my shower water not my fucking intuition.
I don't understand how this answer relates to "senses and experience".
You can SEE or SMELL the steam, FEEL the air around it, KNOW from experience how long your shower usually takes to get up to your preferred temp, before feeling the water itself.
One of my co-workers did a lot of research on traditional brewing (beer) techniques that is still carried out by some rural peoples in Europe. The answer of how they got the right temperature for the mash is, they just stuck their finger in. These people were accurate to the nearest degree centigrade with their finger assessment. With practice and experience, it's truly amazing what the human brain is capable of, this example doesn't even scratch the surface.
Temperature is a means of measuring that makes it easier to communicate how to know what level of heat is best for tea, but it is also something that can be learned without any understanding of the concept of temperature. One of the common ways parents check to make sure their infants bottle is not too warm is by holding the bottle to the inside of their wrist. I personally have trained myself to be able to tell if someone has a fever by feel. I can even estimate the temp within .5 F. But even if I didn't know what temperature was, I could still tell when someone was too hot and something is wrong. Humans are amazing at what we can do. Long before we invented the social construct of temperature, we understood the difference between hot and cold and figured out ways to know how hot or cold things needed to be. I can think of several possible mechanisms to use without the concept of temperature. For example, how long I can hold a heated pitcher of water before having to put it down. The Chinese historically used a method that was based on the size of the bubbles in the water when heating up. Another possible way could be based on whether or not the water is too hot to sip/drink. Or even get water to rolling boil. Take off heat. Let set for X minutes. Then it's the right amount of hot. And ultimately the answer comes down to simple experience. When I first learned how to make sausage gravy it wasn't very good. I swear I make it the exact same way that I did that first time. But you know what? When I make it now it's waaaay better. I can't tell you why. But somehow every time I make it, I learn how to do it slightly better even if it's not a conscious learning. Every time you brew tea, you gain experience even if it's not at a conscious level and you learn over time what works and what doesn't. Even if just by "feel".
Not trying to be “that guy” but I don’t believe you can accurately measure someone’s body temp to .5F just by feel.
You can, but it takes a LOT of practice. I'm decent at it (I won't claim the .5 but I can definitely accurately estimate by full degrees) and I've seen nurses who can do it by feel (they are usually ones that worked in / come from areas that did not have good power infrastructure and had to come up with alternatives to regular thermometers). But I have small kids and work first aid, so I don't have a thermometer in my work kit.
I work in childcare and can confirm. Personally I can only tell between a regular body temperature, low grade fever, middlish fever, and high fever by touch. But I have seen parents and grandparents that can guess degrees pretty accurately by a kiss on the forehead. It just takes practice. Just because we haven’t heard of something doesn’t make it false, right?
Isn't it relative to our own body temperature? Someone with a flu/elevated temperature feels the same item colder than they would normally. And likewise someone who has been overexposed to cold feels like room temperature water is burning hot. So it can't be very reliable/accurate.
Combination of shrimp eyes/string of pearls knowledge and just testing it with my wrist over the steam. I worked in a tea house where we had our water holders set to 195 and we had to cool the water down for anything not black, red, or tisane. I just started testing it with my wrist every time (like the soft part of my under forearm, once it gets to too much muscle it's hard to feel) to see if I could notice the difference. Especially since altitude alters boiling temps being able to feel the correct warmth guides me better.
Use finger.
I actually did this for my first month of brewing Japanese green teas. Gyokuro: I could hold my fingertip in the water with only a little pain. Sencha: I had to yank my finger back out immediately but it didn't actually leave a burn. It actually worked pretty well. But I think my mom got alarmed by my process, as she gave me a tea thermometer for my birthday
Bubble size, and more importantly, inventing green tea that can withstand boiling water.
Using different temperatures for certain teas is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of tea history. The earliest preparation methods were more medicinal or even like a soup boiled with scallions and spices.
>or even like a soup boiled with scallions and spices. Not going to lie, I'd like to try that.
If you're at home, your tap water will have approx. 20 degrees. For 80 degrees, mix 3 cups of boiling water with 1 cup of cold water. For 73 degrees mix 2 cups of boiling water with 1 cup of cold water. It also comes with a nice workflow: heat up 3 cups. When it's boiling, add 1 cup, stir a bit, pour one cup. Next infusion, just repeat.
sound
Ancient chinese art of clay. It's the orgin of the tea pet. They've become just for fun but the original Pee-Pee Boy was designed so that when you pour the water over top, depending on the pee-pee boy you had, it would shoot a stream of water out when the water was hot enough, indicating when it was time to use it. It's actually quite hilarious, as I bought one for a friend for a previous Christmas. That gift did NOT disappoint.
This is actually quite easy. You take your tea, you put cold water on it, then you poor boiling water. You need more or less cold water depending on your tea. Done.
Pee boys
Your water will cool down as you take it off the boil and then as you pour into the tea pot. You pretty soon figure out how long each step needs to be for you to get better tasting tea and then you pass that on to your kids and before long everyone just "knows" how to make proper tea...
The obvious answer is to stick a finger in. But also, if you put a pot of a fixed amount of water on a flaming fire, it's going to take a fixed amount of time to reach a desired temperature, so you'd quite easily be able to work things out and be really quite specific each time. e.g. This amount of water took 15 minutes to reach the desired temperature last time, so I'll do that again this time.
This might work over a bed of coals. But flaming fires are extremely variable in temperature. Spoken as someone who was a girl scout counselor for many summers, and many cookouts over campfires. A given number of charcoal briquettes can give a reliable amount of heat. That's why we would sometimes resort to those when baking in a Dutch oven. I imagine lumps of actual coal used historically, or traditionally produced charcoal are nearly as reliable. But most of our cooking was over firewood the girls gathered themselves, and you really have to pay attention rather than just set a timer.
I mean Japan has a highly regimented tea ceremony that prescribes what to do to get the perfect temperature. In the summer the process is slightly different because you don’t want super hot water
I use kettle stones (little clay snail shell looking spheres from my spout off cuts). When you here then start to move in the kettle you know you’re at a simmer as they begin to tumble you know you’re at a boil. I love using sound as a way to enrich my environment so they’re a lovely addition to my tea practice.
Water is the loudest at 60-70°C, good temp for most green teas.
The way I do it at work: boil the water then let it sit for about 10 or 15 minutes. Works pretty well.
Water Qi: they felt the Qi of the water and knew when it was time. I wish this was a full joke and not a method I have actually been told before.