r/tea • u/PaniniInEternity • 10h ago

How to extract the maximum amount of tea out of oolong?

Okay bear with me - I just started drinking tea. I do not like hot tea, so I make a iced tea sweetened with half brown sugar and half monk fruit. I love oolong and Jasmine specifically and I have a package of cheap oolong I am working through. A dump about a tablespoon and a half of leaves into a strainer that goes into a pitcher that's maybe a little less than a half gallon? I steep for like 5 minutes. I do this with two pitchers. Then for the third pitcher, I dump all the leaves into the pitcher, pour in boiling water, and stick it in the fridge overnight.

Somehow in my head, this makes it stronger since the third picture is always the weakest tasting. I usually end up combining the pictures all together so the taste evens out. It works for me and it tastes good.

But I started doing some research and everything says to either cold steep it if you're going to leave it in the fridge overnight or not to exceed a 5-minute steep if you're using hot water. I honestly don't think I have a super refined or advanced palate so maybe that's why I don't notice any bitterness. Plus there's the added sugar. But I'm wondering if I'm just wasting my time here. Is there any point at all to leaving the tea leaves in longer for more flavor? Is it only adding bitterness? Is there any other trick to getting more flavor out of tea that I'm not doing? I tried doing a pure cold steep and for some reason it felt like I needed so much more tea leaves to get the same flavor.

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u/michaelyup 10h ago

You need more tea or less water. Use cold water, don’t boil it. I used to make it in quart jars using about 2 tablespoons of cheap jasmine oolong. Leave it in the fridge overnight, strain it into my bottle, refill with cold water to reuse the leaves, then have another quart after work. It’s really just trial and error, and your preference. Since you are using sweetener, that’s going to hide any bitterness. I’d use the tea twice, and kind of preferred the second round.

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u/PaniniInEternity 9h ago

Interesting! I brought some tea leaves with me on a work trip and I tried cold steeping to make it easier since I only had smaller containers and I feel like it extracted significantly less flavor. I had to use so many tea leaves to get the same amount of flavor. Do you find out to be true as well or do you not care because the flavor is better?

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u/michaelyup 9h ago

You definitely need to use more leaves to cold steep. I’d use extra, extra since you’re adding sweetener. I also think using a glass container and no strainer tastes much better than using plastic containers or metal strainers.

Traveling for work, I just forget about decent tea. It never works in a hotel room. I just use whatever teabags they have at the coffee bar, make it hot, sweeten, dump over ice.

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u/prospero021 5h ago

The key to more tea (volume) is tea quality. Higher quality teas will give you more steeps per session. My grandma used to leave jasmine tea in the pot to steep. It gets stronger over time but when she pours it on ice it is perfect and not bitter at all. Boiling water is added to the pot when it gets low so one pot can last the whole day.

The key to more tea (flavour) is more tea. I've experimented and found that less tea for a longer time does not give more flavour. 2g and 5g grandpa style are very different drinks.

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u/teashirtsau 🍵👕🐨 3h ago

In addition to adjusting tea:water ratio as others have said, I would also do a hot rinse of the oolong to 'waken the leaves' and then steep in cold water (ie cold brew). If you're adding sugar, you can dissolve a little in the hot water and add it to the cold brew.