Chai Baba's Teapresso in Kelowna, BC.
Fortunately in 2008, most modern tea bars in North America are promoting and using tea in it's loose leaf form, and like myself, they tend to shun the inferior bag version. Not all bags are god-awful though, there are some exceptions - Mighty Leaf being one of them. They have a very good product with the most compostable packaging in the industry(as far as I know anyway)
Currently, the Asian tea market is all about speed and innovation (with quality playing second fiddle), and this is where the Teapresso is becoming a standard piece of tea bar equipment - essential and timely.
The general practice in the far east is to insert a nylon tea bag into the porta filter and extract a shot of tea. It may work for the throngs of tea drinkers in Asia, but it doesn't make for a great presentation over on this side of the pond - especially when your shelves are full of beautiful loose leaf teas.
To compete with the Starbucks and Second Cup's of the world, tea purveyors and new tea lounges need to use the extensive array of tea we stock in our stores to create a repetiore of drinks that rival and surpass any of the afore mentioned coffee chains. The Teapresso is the only machine I currently know of that can take your loose leaves and turn it into a strong, concentrated, versatile tea shot, thus allowing you to create any number of hot or cold beverages in under a minute. If you know of another way to acheive this without using quadruple the amount of tea, I would love to know.
After much experiamentation with various leaf sizes, cuts, grades and varieties of loose tea and infusions, I came the the realization that the design of the porta filter needed some adjustment to accomodate loose leaf effectively. Ideally, the tea needs to be mulched to expedite the extraction process. Full leaf did not produce a strong enough shot in the few minutes of time you have to get the drink into the customers hands.
Mulched tea on the other hand, does allow the operator to produce a drink in the 45-60 second range. The problem I ran into though, when I did mulch loose leaf tea, is it would clog the holes in the bottom of the diffuser plate inside the porta filter.
Minute grains of tea would embed themselves in the holes of the diffuser, expand from the hot water and completly block the openings, rendering the tea shot pretty much useless. It will actually push small grains of tea right through the porta filter and into your shot glass. You can see the holes in the diffuser plate in this pic:
After much trial and error, I realized that the process of mulching the loose tea had to be incredibly precise to allow for proper extraction of a clear tea shot - too precise to train staff & create an industry standard.
During the testing phase, I was spooning 2 teaspoons of loose leaf into a mini grinder (the same ones used at home for grinding coffee beans)and mulching it for 3-5 seconds. The results would vary from tea to tea. I should tell you that all the CTC teas that I used in the porta filter work extremely well - no pre-mulching, no clogging, and a strong, clean tea shot resulted.
So, the only real solution for us loose tea afficianado's was to revamp the inside of the porta filter so that it would accomodate various grain sizes of tea and not clog. I posed this dilemma to Klub in Taiwan and within a few months, they sent over a prototype of a screen insert that screws into the porta filter. The diffuser plate is removed. The screen prevented tiny tea grnules to embed themselves into the holes and clog. Here is a picture of the screen they sent:
This fine nylon screen prevented a lot of the clogging issues that occur without the screen in place. The smallest particles of tea now do not get create havoc with your shot, but stay on the screen side of the porta filter. The screen works very well and has allowed us to use pretty much any loose leaf tea, tisane or infusion without much concern for the particle size. The extraction is even, strong and very flavorful.
Here is the screen installed inside the porta filter:
As the use of the Teapresso gets much more widespread, you will see a whole industry spring up around the packaging of loose teas cut and prepared to a grade that will be suitable for use in the Teapresso. It has already started in Asia.
As I mentioned above, CTC teas seem to be the ideal grain size and yield the best shot that I was able to achieve with real teas.
Unfortately, most of the teas we carry in our tea bars and tea houses are not of the CTC grade. It is a start though, and learning what a great tea shot looks & tastes like from ctc will allow you to create some basic drinks early on as your understanding of a quality tea shot grows with continued use of the Teapresso. It is a fun and excting learning curve!
I hope this information has been helpful. I wish you all the success with your new Teapresso.
Brendan
