Stuff You Should Know - How Tea Works

Episode Date: March 12, 2015

Legend has it that tea was discovered by a curious Chinese emperor after leaves blew into his boiled water. Now tea is the second only to water in popularity worldwide. And despite the varieties of tea, they all come from a single species of plant. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from house stuffworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry in Studio 1A. You just pointed us out to each other, except I was going to be like, who is Jerry and who is me? Who is Jerry? So I'm Chuck. You're Chuck.

Okay. That's Jerry. All right. I was a little confused. Right there. Gotcha. Here's the lady. I'm a dude.

Yeah. All right. Now that we have that sorted. Let's talk to you. Or we could change the name of the podcast to Two Dudes and a Lady. Yeah, we could. Maybe that'll be our side cast where we talk about this podcast. Right.

Side cast. That's right. Coined by Josh Clark, circa 2015. So now you own that. I just put it on wax. Pretty sweet. Yeah. Pretty slick.

Yeah. So, Chuck. Yeah. You ever drank tea? I just finished up some green tea. Are you still a green tea drinker? Yeah. I mean, I like all kinds of tea, but I drank some green because I was studying for this

and it just was like, yeah, sure. You used to drink it by like the mini pitcher full. Yeah. I used to drink it cold. Yeah. You don't either? I had this hot. Well, it is winter time.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you like tea? I like green tea. Yeah. I like green tea the most. I like chilled green tea. Sure.

I don't like Wu Long, which until, I guess, today or yesterday, I thought was Wu Long. Did you know it was Wu Long? I had no idea and I've never had it. I have. It's very woody. It's almost like roots, like you put some roots in some water. Yum. Warm water.

Yum. Let it steep for a while or steep. Steep. I don't know why I always have trouble with that. It's clearly steep. Seep is different. Yeah. It's a different word.

But for my whole life, I've confused steep and steep when it comes to tea. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, Wu Long, not the biggest fan. I like green tea and I like it chilled. Black tea, I'm not really big on. Yeah, I like a good English breakfast tea.

Love it. Do you? Or Earl Grey, you like those two? Sure, man. A little cream, a little sugar. Yeah. And then, of course, you've got your herbal teas. Yeah, I don't like those.

Oh, you don't? No. I've been drinking Celestial Seasoning's Tension Tamer. So that's not actually tea, right? Well, that was the big reveal that I was working up to. I was just plodding along, but now that you've brushed me, I will agree with you. Not all of those are tea. Right.

Sorry about that. Those aren't tea. Here's the really big reveal, though, Chuck. English breakfast tea, green tea, Wu Long, white tea, you remember that Snapple ad where that old man shows the backpacker dude? No. Oh, it's like a Snapple white tea and he goes, we put up the top and he's like, that's it.

And he goes, that's it. And that's white tea. All of those are the same thing. They're all the same. They come from the same plant. One plant. Did you know that? I did not know that until I researched.

It's a Chamelea Sinensis is the tea plant, the tea bush. And now we have to say there are different varieties of Chamelea Sinensis. Sea Sinensis is what those in the know call it. Oh, yeah. Well, horticulturist. Sure. But the plant itself, there's one species of tea plant. And that's what it's, that's what it all comes from.

It's how the tea is made that explains the differences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, you add some stuff like apparently Earl Grey has the essential oil of the bergamot orange mixed in, which is nice. Sure. But that's still tea. It is tea. Yes, right.

It's got something added to it. Now, if you just took bergamot orange, dried it out, put it in a tea bag and sold it as herbal tea. That's like orange dream. We wouldn't have tea. No. It's not tea. It's not tea.

It's a dried herb that you steep or seep depending on your preference in warm water. Yeah, it's a steeped hot beverage. Beverage. That's a good way of saying it, because it's exactly what it is. So the cat's out of the bag, which means now that we've done that, we have to explain everything there is to know about tea. That is right. And I guess there's no better place to start than the 2737 BC.

Of course. And the emperor of China. No one knows if this story is true, of course. It's a pretty good story, though. But it's a good story, because we don't know the exact origin of tea. It's been around for a long time, but some people say Chinese emperor, Xin Neng, who ruled about 5,000 years ago, was traveling through China, and he was big into sanitation. Yeah.

Smart guy. Like boil your water kind of sanitation. This is thousands of years before germ theory. Yeah, totally. He was a couple hundred years old. I wonder what led him to that conclusion, which was spot-on, you know? I don't know. I don't know.

We can get in the way back between and ask him. Yeah. That's right. Okay. It's a lot of fuel for that one question. But it's a pretty good question, because yeah, you're right. It's spot-on. How do you know that boiling water kills germs if you don't know what germs are?

Exactly. So he was traveling through China, and reportedly stopped to rest, and was preparing some boiled water, some delicious boiled water, and a gust of wind blew some leaves from a bush into the water, changing the color, and he was like, hey, this is a different color now. Let me try it. Well, he was renowned as a scientist. Yeah. Sure.

He was definitely the very least curious fellow, and yeah, he decided to try it. He's like different colored boiled water. Of course, I'm going to try that and see what it's like. I bet he had his right hand try it first, and then five minutes later it was like, okay. Yeah, exactly. He didn't die. I think that's what all those fat cats did back then.

Sure. So it turns out that that was debris detritus from the Camellia sinensis, tea. Tea was born. Tea was born in China. No one knows if that story is true, I think like you said, but it's a pretty great story, and since we don't know the true origin of tea, why not? Yeah, I'll go with that. It's not that far-fetched.

And the Western Zhao dynasty was around, the tea was a religious offering, and during the Han dynasty, it was pretty limited, so it was safe for royalty. By the time the Tang dynasty came around, which was 618 to 907, they found a bunch, they found, discovered a lot of more tea plants. Isn't that ironic that tea became established during the Tang dynasty? Yeah, that's pretty funny, because Tang is opposite of tea, right? Yeah, I guess. In some ways.

I mean, they're both water-based, so probably not the opposite. Right. I don't know what would be the opposite of tea. So like I said, they found a bunch more plants in the Tang dynasty, and the Chinese government actually said, you know what, everyone should drink tea, because it's good for you, and we can make money off of it, of course. And then from the Tang dynasty, it spread to Japan by priests who were studying in China. They also brought Buddhism at the same time.

Both of them took root. The Japanese said, we like this. Let's try making some other stuff out of it, and they actually created the tea ceremony, which is a big deal in Japan still to this day. Have you taken part in one of those? I have not. Yumi took some classes when she taught in Japan years back, but apparently it's just one of these things where you're just constantly learning.

It's never like, I'm a master at tea. You're always learning more, you're always trying to be perfect, and the thing that's so elusive about it is it's supposed to be utterly simple. It's elaborate, but the steps are meant to be simple, like it's a very simple, plain form thing. Like the sushi rice. It's like, why are the Japanese obsessed with doing things really well? They really are.

They don't fund it in. But the whole thing behind the tea ceremony and the Japanese adoption of it is that there's this idea that tea sitting down and sharing ceremonially in a ritual manner, a cup of tea can bring peace between people. What's the... The tea ceremony? Chenouyu? Yeah, there's a saying.

Chenouyu. There's another saying. Yeah, it's... Cup of tea? Hang with me. Ichigo Ichi-e, one time, one meeting, which is the idea that every encounter is unique and can't be duplicated. Right.

Very nice. That is nice. So in Europe, I think a lot of people associate tea, of course, with England and Europe, the UK and Britain. Yeah. Took a little while though. All those places? There was a lag.

Yeah, there was. We're in the 17th century now and the Portuguese were the first people to not import tea, but drink tea in England. Yeah, they were trading in the East Indies, specifically Java and the Dutch, if you'll remember from... Did we ever do a full nutmeg episode? I think we did, right? Yeah.

Cinnamon too. All this showed up back then in the 17th century in the East Indies around Indonesia, Java. The Portuguese just had the place on lockdown until the Dutch came in and were like, we're taking over. Yeah. One of the things that came out of that was the import or the introduction of tea to Europe through the Dutch.

Yeah, they pretty much horned in on their trading routes and brought tea to Holland from China. Mm-hmm. And then from Holland, of course, it spread throughout Europe. And I think the King of England at one point married a Portuguese woman in that... A princess. Yeah, princess. That had a lot to do with the two, of course. And then they married Catherine of Braganza, who was, it says in this article, a tea addict.

And she was like, let's drink some tea, man. And all of Great Britain kind of followed suit. Because back then, once a princess did something, you know, everybody wanted to do that, even if she was a fiend of some sort. Like a caffeine fiend. So the end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade in China, which happened in 1834, was a really big deal. Because basically, they, you know, everything was coming from China until then.

And then at that point, the East India Company said, hey, we could grow our own tea in India. Yeah. And we're going to start doing it. Yep. And they did. And by 1839, they had enough cultivation going on that they had the first auction of Assam tea in Britain. Which is...

That's the variety that they used to make Darjeeling tea. Oh, is it? Uh-huh. Assam. Assam production today, right? Yeah. India, China, Kenya, and Sri Lanka are the big four tea producers. Yeah.

The Indonesia, I think, is fifth. And they're like, can't you just say top five? Right. We don't produce... Well, they do produce a lot, but not nearly as much. The other thing too that happened during that, the monopoly was... The tea clipper was born, which is pretty neat. When the company had the monopoly, there was basically no rush to get it there.

Because they had the monopoly. Right. Like, you'll get the tea, and we'll sail over there, and we'll all be good. You ever heard of Slow Boat to China? Is that where it came from? Could've. What about High Road to China with your boy, Tom Selleck? Oh, yeah.

You remember that movie? I never saw it. Yeah. It wasn't very good. That was his brief foray into major motion pictures. Yeah. Didn't he play like the king of Spain in one of the Columbus pictures back in the early 90s?

Oh, I think I remember that. Yeah. What was that? Well, either 1492 or Columbus. Yeah. I can't remember. So the tea clipper, yes. There was no rush, but until when that monopoly ended, it was basically like the fastest boat

to get there. The fastest ship will be the one that gets the sail. So they started making these new ships that had huge sails and tall masts and could go a lot faster, and it started the era of the tea clipper races. Basically, you would leave the Canton River in China, go down the China Sea, cross the Indian Ocean, slink around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic, pass the Azores and into the English Channel, then you were towed up the River Thames by a tugboat, and the first boat to throw their load up on the docks would be the winter, which was pretty neat

until they built the Suez Canal, and then it was like, oh, well, it took off the fun out of that. It sounds like a pretty great race, though. Yeah, it was, yeah, I wonder how long that took. I think they were just hauling butt the whole time, too. Yeah, but even still, it had to take weeks. Oh, sure. I would think so.

And this, we should say, this was the mid-19th century. We would be remiss to do an episode on tea and not mention the Boston Tea Party, which is a thing everybody knows about the Boston Tea Party. What I didn't realize is that the British royalty, the British crown, still, even after losing the colonies, in part over tea taxes, still continued to tax the heck out of tea at least a decade after or before they finally relented and started to drastically reduce it. Yeah.

In the face of tons and tons of piracy and smuggling, apparently, in the late 18th century, seven million pounds of tea were smuggled into Britain and five million pounds were legally imported. So the smuggling, there was more smuggled tea than legal tea in Great Britain in the late 18th century, right? But apparently, despite all this, it wasn't until 1964 that the British government finally said, you know what, we're going to stop fiddling with the teatax and just not tax tea anymore.

When was this? 1960s? 1964. Crazy. Yeah. Wow. Tea is huge in Britain. Yeah.

And at this point in the late 19th century is when I think the average Briton was consuming about six pounds a year per person. It's a lot of tea. Yeah. I wonder what that would be today. I meant to look that up. Is that wet harvest or dry harvest? I don't know, man.

Is that a seeped tea bag? It's not seeped. That's a lot of tea. Yeah, that is a lot of tea. So Chuck, we got the history under our belt. We'll move into how tea is actually made after this. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back.

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Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. The Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, buddy, we were talking about the history. And then before that, we mentioned that there were four main types of tea. Yeah. Green, black, wulong, wu tang, and white tea. I just don't understand how O-O-L-O-N-G is wulong. It's wulong.

I guess the W is both, it's invisible, but not silent. Yeah. You know? And like we said, all those teas come from chameleus sinensis, and there's different varieties of them. Like the Assam makes Darjeeling. But the way that you process the leaves is where the differences come about, right? That's right.

What's interesting to me is all tea, almost all tea in the whole wide world, is harvested by hand. Yeah. Like, I think, what was the spice we were talking about? Nutmeg. Saffron. Saffron. Yeah, I think nutmeg too.

When did we talk about Saffron? I think I mentioned it in the Cinnamon podcast, it's expensive because it can only be hand harvested. Right, right. And anytime you're involving people, it's going to cost more than some big stupid machine that can do tons of it at once. And that is certainly the case with tea because there are only a couple of harvest a year. The first flush in the early spring, the second flush in the summer, and they really care

for the tea plant. They pick and prune at them year round, but they only choose, what, a couple of leaves from each plant when they're actually harvesting. Yeah, so the top two leaves and the bud in between them. That's crazy. That's your tea. Something else is just basically the home for the tea that's harvested, like the rest of the plant.

Yeah. This huge, enormous plant bush shrub is just there to sprout out these little bits and the little sprouts are the tea that we drink. That's amazing. And that's all the tea. That's the Oolong. That's the black tea. That's the white tea.

That's the green tea. That's all of them. It's from these shrubs, just the top two little leaves in the bud. That's right. Once they're picked by hand, they are taken to the factory, which is on the plantation because something starts happening as soon as you pick it, and that's called oxidation. And oxidation needs to be very controlled because it's not necessarily a bad thing because it actually is partially why you get certain varieties of tea.

Right, yeah. Depending on the kind of tea you want, you either want oxidation or you want to prevent oxidation. And we should probably say oxidation basically is when any kind of molecule, but specifically an oxygen molecule, or O2, interacts with something like the metal in a car, the inside of an apple, the leaf off of a tea shrub. Once the oxygen interacts with it, it starts a chain reaction inside where these oxygen molecules that have two pair or two unstable or unpaired electrons.

Once the oxygen interacts with some other atoms in the cells of these things, it robs those atoms of their electrons, right, because it wants to pair up. And when it does this, it starts the process of oxidation. Yeah, which is actually John Fuller, our old buddy, wrote this one, and he was a big tea guy. Big. I imagine he still is. He's characterized it as actually burning it.

So like when you eat your apple bite and you go to your desk and you leave it there and then you go to the bathroom for an hour or so, you come back, the reason your apple is brown now is because you've exposed that inside to the O2 and it's burning it. Yeah, because normally the apple, the inside of the apple is protected from the oxygen and the air we breathe in the atmosphere by the skin. Once you puncture the skin, once you break the skin, it's exposed to oxygen and that process of oxidation takes place. Same thing happens with a leaf from a tea shrub.

When it's attached to the shrub, it's protected from the outside air. Once you pluck it from there, and especially once you break it or tear it apart or do something with it, it's exposed to that air and oxidation takes place and it withers in very much the same way that a leaf on a tree, a dead leaf in the fall, withers and changes color. Oxidation as well. Yeah, like you said too, the same thing that can happen to your car if you don't get that true coat. Yeah.

That's why you pay thousands and thousands of dollars more at the dealership for that true coat. That's right. Black tea is the leader of all teas, accounts for about 75% of production. Like you said, the Earl Grey or the English breakfast tea, that's black tea. It's not always, I mean, it doesn't necessarily look black, it's kind of a reddish brown when you seep it. Yeah.

FDC. Deep. That's right. Yeah. I'm not going to help out your problem, am I? No. I'm just going to confuse you. I thought I might knock it out today, but no, it's gotten worse, I think, actually.

Yeah. You've also said Oolong a couple of times. Yeah, that's kind of by choice. So with black tea in particular, that's like the oxidation master. That's right. That's the one you want oxidation for. So with the actual process of making tea, of processing tea leaves into black tea, you're actually inviting oxidation.

And you're doing that. Well, you want to talk about how you make black tea? Yeah. It's a five-step process. I mean, there's a couple of methods, but they both include generally these five steps. Yeah, one is by robot and the other is by human hand. Pretty much the orthodox method and the CTC or the cut tear curl method, which sounds cool, but it's not because orthodox is by hand, which means it's better.

And all of this, again, takes place in the factory on the plantation grounds after the human hands have harvested the tea leaves and brought them to the factory a couple of fields over. The first step is weathering and that's when you're going to spread it out and let them weather like we were talking about with the leaf that falls. It's just basically losing moisture. Yes. After that, you've got rolling where if you're using the orthodox method, the human hand

method, you're actually rolling out and pressing the leaves so that you're kind of pressing the moisture out, but you're also simultaneously pressing some of the oils, those beneficial oils inside the tea leaf out so that they stick to the outside of the leaf. So they're kind of retained and dehydrated. Yeah. And if you're doing the hand method, it's a gentle process. You're trying not to break the leaf with the CTC method. They're just chopping it up because it's a big dumb machine.

Right. And with, say, other types of tea, you wouldn't use that method because when you do chop it up, you're exposing it to oxidation. Yeah, even more right. Right, which is part of the process. That's actually the third step is oxidation. So after the leaves are either pressed by the orthodox method or cut by robots, it's left out in a kind of a damp, cool space to basically oxidize even further to turn copper,

turn brown, wither, and then lose the rest of their moisture. That's right, which is a good thing. Don't be sad. In the case of black tea. Yes. From here, you're going to dry it out with some hot air and the color's going to change even more from that copper that came from the green. And now you've got your brown and your black coloring going on.

Yep. And then you put the leaves by size and by quality, or if it's going to become, say, bagged tea or something, it's chopped up almost into like a powder, just little tiny bits, and then bagged and all that stuff. But if it's just loose leaf, then it's sorted by size and quality. That's right. And you're going to pay more for it. Yeah.

And that's black tea. And that 75% of the tea produced in the world goes through that process, either by human hand or by robot hand. Green tea is next, and that, like we said a million times, is from the same plant. So cool. It is very cool. But basically what happens here is it's pretty much the same process, but you're just not oxidizing it as long because you're going to steam it, or I didn't know this.

You could pan fry it, I guess, if you're just growing your own tea and doing it in your house. You're John Favreau. You just saw Chef, right? Man, that was a good movie. It was a very good movie. Way better than Birdman. The only thing I didn't like a spoiler about Chef was the whole social media thing.

Oh yeah, that was like almost underwritten by Twitter. Yeah. It was a little weird. I thought it was just strange that they're like willing to date the movie. Totally. That much. Exactly what I thought. You go see it in 10 years, you're going to be like, this is so 2014.

Yeah, I thought it was not necessary either. But anyway, good movie. It was a great movie, and I thought it still fit. It's just thinking 10 years down the road, it's going to be odd. Right. Like the movies that talk about MySpace. Yeah. Yeah.

Sad, sad movies. But where were we? We were drying out. We were steaming. Well, you were saying, and this is the point of steaming, is it stops oxidation. Yeah, and it keeps it green. Hence the name, green tea, and it's not just that the tea leaves themselves are green or greenish, they're supposed to be, but also it imparts a greenish hue to the actual brewed

tea as well. And the way that the green from the original green color of the leaves is kept is from preventing oxidation, and that's done by steaming. And I looked everywhere to see how steaming prevented oxidation. I couldn't find it. I think it's one of those things where people are just like, yep, it does it. Everyone's content to basically stop right there, and I'm like, no, how? And I tried to reword it a couple of different ways, and I'm like, okay, how does heat prevent

oxidation? I couldn't find that either. But apparently that's what it does. So I don't know if it seals the cells off maybe. It cauterizes them somehow, and it prevents the oxygen from getting to it. Yeah, we'll hear from someone. Yeah, if you know how steam prevents oxidation, please let us know. But as far as we can tell, it actually does.

That's right. And we should point out here that there can be a range in hue. There can be a yellowish hue sometimes, and there's actually something I didn't know about that you told me about, yellow tea. Yeah. So supposedly the steaming process can go a little awry, or it used to back in the day more frequently. The early steam days?

Yeah. And it produces another type of tea. It's called yellow tea. And that's like sold. You can get it now? I don't know. I'm sure there's some specialty store that sells yellow tea. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So basically at this point, green tea is after it's frozen in time and staying green, the process is about the same. Forever young. It is. And the process from there is the same as with black tea, pretty much. Yeah.

You're going to sort it, you're going to cool it, you're going to dry it out, you're going to sort it again, and then sort it one more time. All right. A lot of redundancy in creating green tea. And now we're at Wu Long. Or Wu Long, which is basically like, it's kind of like yellow tea. I don't think they're one and the same, but it's steamed, but it's steamed after the oxidation process has taken place to an extent.

So it's oxidized, but not as much as black tea, and it's steamed, but not as early as green tea. So Wu Long is between the two. What's crazy is it doesn't taste like black tea or green tea at all. It's definitely its own thing. Yeah. Still it's from the same plant. I don't think I've ever had it at all.

Yeah. I need to just try some and see what's all the fuss is about. If you go to like a Lawson's, which is a chain of convenience stores in Japan, strangely enough. Okay. You can go in. That is a little weird. And pretty much anywhere you can buy like water, green tea, and Wu Long tea, like in a cooler.

Yeah. Like you can get it everywhere. Those three things. And you should try all of them. You have to try Wu Long at least once. Yeah. I'll try some tomorrow. Okay.

That's my, that's my dedication to you, sir. Thanks, man. Then you have your white tea, and that is very much a specialty tea and somewhat rare. And it is only picked two days out of the year when the buds aren't open yet, and it's less grassy and it's a little smoother, but it is similar to green tea. And it has only been available outside of China for not that long, just a few years, right? Snapple's only been making it for a couple of years.

Well, that should date it immediately. Like Twitter dates Chef. And it was reserved for Chinese nobility because of, you know, how rare it is. Yeah. But now you can get it. And we talked about other kinds of tea, too. Like herbal tea, again, is just basically dried herbs that you steep just like regular tea.

You know, like chai? Chai is actually tea. That's right. Because it's tea. Black spice. Mixed with spices like cinnamon and pepper and stuff. So that still constitutes tea. But like chamomile tea, it's not really tea.

Yeah. It's a tussain. Right. It's just, again, it's just some dehydrated chamomile flowers that you steep in hot water. Same goes for Rui bus, which is a mouthful, but it means red bush and africans. That's right. Same with mate, which is not to be confused with matcha. No.

But we'll talk about matcha, right? Yes. Let's talk about matcha, Chuck. Because I love the stuff. I had not been, maybe you can call me a matcha poser or jumping on the matcha bandwagon. Yeah. In that article you said that it's the darling of the tea set now? Yeah.

And my friend in California, PJ, in LA, you've met PJ. PJ. He is, or was, he may have bailed on it, but he was trying to make his own special matcha green tea and bottle it and sell it. Oh, I get what you mean. I don't think he got past the making it at home stage. Well, there's a lot. There's not a lot to it, but there's, again, I think the Japanese tea ceremony is surrounded

or surrounds matcha. Yeah. That's what you're preparing is matcha. That's right. And all matcha is is like really, really good green tea that's been ground down to a fine power by hand, which automatically makes it more expensive than any other teas, most other teas. And what you have is this really fine, beautiful green powder, and you put like a teaspoon of

it in a bowl or a cup or something like that, and you're supposed to sift it, I think, through like a sifter. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Just to open it back up again. Sure. Make it pop. And then you add some hot water and then you use a whisk to stir it.

Yeah. And there's, I don't think we mentioned the other big difference with matcha is that bushes, the bushes are covered 20 days prior to harvest from sunlight. And that's the big distinction. And that means it's going to have a lot more chlorophyll and something called L-theanine. Oh, that stuff is good. This is the amino acid that, apparently, that's what allows you to feel both invigorated and calmed.

Yeah. It works in conjunction with caffeine. Okay. And it's actually capable, it's an amino acid, like you said, that is capable of crossing the blood brain barrier. So like when you drink it, it goes right to your brain. It doesn't have to be converted or metabolized, right? And it supposedly has all sorts of cool benefits like cognitive enhancement.

Oh, wow. You're just kind of clearer. It's just neat stuff. Well, and that's what the matcha proponents will tell you, like have some of this stuff, man. Hey. It's like go juice. You'll be clearheaded.

Take a head of this. There's a couple of forms, there's the yusucha and the koicha, or is it the koicha? Probably koicha. K-O-I-cha? Yeah. Koicha. Yusucha is thin tea and koicha is thick tea. And the koicha, man, that is something else.

That is made with half the water, twice the matcha. Oh, that sounds like my kind of matcha. Well, they say by the time you're done whisking it, it's going to be like the texture of paint. Oh, wow. It's like some serious matcha. Yeah. Because matcha has like a distinct taste. Oh, yeah.

I love it. I mean, I'll make like, I get it at the Asian market near my house and I will just add it to my regular green tea. Oh, yeah. I'll like, I'll whisk it up and then just add it there. That's good. But it's a suspension. It's not a, you're not actually, you're drinking the tea leaf.

Right. Like if you mix up your matcha and then leave it there a few hours later, it's going to be separated. Yeah. It stinks. It's a colloid. Is that what that's called? I think so.

So I'm not going to repeat that because I'm not positive. What the colloid thing? Yeah. Is it a colloid? Well, I believe so. Like quicksand. A colloid is a mixture of something. Yeah.

Something that's like, it's not actually dissolved. It's just mixed together. I think you are right. So it's a colloid and people, proponents will say that it's better for you because when you sip tea. I screwed you up. When you sip steep tea, right, you're only getting a, you know, I don't know the percentage, but you're only getting some of the benefits of the tea because the tea leaf is still in

there. Right. With a matcha, you're actually ingesting the tea leaf. Oh, I see. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that jam goes right past the blood brain barrier. And it does.

And it's pretty trendy too because you can now get a restaurant and they'll be like matcha sprinkled on a food dish or, um, Have you been to Umisushi yet? No. I went to craft Izakaya the other night though. So where is, is that in Krogg's? Yeah. Is it good?

It was really good. And I actually had a cocktail. I thought about you because, you know, I don't. Oh yeah. You don't drink cocktails that much. It was good. It was a bourbon and like lemon and ginger and Thai spice. Like one other thing, maybe honey.

It was pretty tasty. I bet it was. It was good. Sounds good. And the food was excellent. It was spicy, but it's, you know, like when you eat the sushi, it's, you can so tell the difference. It just melts in your mouth.

Very, very much the same with Umisushi as well. It's just, it's just the quality between that and just about every other sushi you've had is, it's just light years beyond. Yeah. It is really evident when you taste it. I had some of the albacore and it was just like, it was literally like melted butter and whipped on. I'll bet.

So good. The point is Umisushi makes a green tea matcha souffle with creme anglaise. They actually give me replicated ones. It's amazing. It's amazing. So matcha really goes with a lot of really good stuff. Even though it is trendy, it's still good. It is good.

And it's like you said, it's super earthy. It's just, I recommend you try it. I like it a lot. So if I'm getting the good stuff from that Asian market, it's probably the cheap stuff, but it's still tasty. I honestly don't know if it's one of those things where like you get what you pay for or if a lot of it is just jacked up price because it is matcha or what. I don't know.

Now this stuff's pretty inexpensive that I get. Actually for what, for the amount you're getting, it's really not that cheap now that I think about it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's a little canister of it. Yeah.

It's pretty small. You're probably paying what you should be. All right. We talked a little bit about the blood brain barrier, but we'll talk more about the health benefits of tea right after this. Attention Bachelor Nation, he's back, the man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison.

It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. I'll push the envelope, but I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all and now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now?

You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day, truly every day of my life. I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So, I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world

came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we're going to talk about the health benefits, as I said before the break.

But first, let's talk about how to prepare tea. Well, yeah, there's a couple of ways, depending on what you're dealing with. You can either be a loose leaf person or a bagged tea person. And I got the impression from this, like you said, Fuller was a tea guy and he did a very good job of trying to reserve judgment. But if I remember correctly, he was a loose leaf guy and it comes through in this article. The loose leaf was better. Yeah, he had a special little unit there where he poured the water in and it kept the loose

leaf separate, but it was all contained in one cup that you screw a lid on or something. You can get those, or you can just do, there's all sorts of equipment you can have to make your tea. So if you're preparing tea in a bag, you just pop it in some hot water. Well, no, not necessarily, depends on the kind of tea, for what temperature you want your water to be. That is true. And I didn't know this.

Black tea is the only one where you want it boiling at 200 degrees. Wulong, you're going to, is the next and that's about 190, which is close to boiling. Yeah, or you just use your finger to determine whether it's 190 or 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Green and white tea is just steaming water. It's only about 170 degrees. And your black tea, I'm sorry, black and white, take the longest to seep and steep at four and a half to five minutes. Yeah.

Wulong's about three to four and green tea, man, you can get that stuff going in 30 seconds. Boom. And you're drinking it. My tension tamer takes seven minutes to steep. It says on the box. What does it, can you tell the difference to tame your tension? Yeah, I actually can. That's good.

It's pretty neat. I can't remember what's in it, but it talks about the active ingredient, whatever the dried herb is. But with the difference between bag tea and loose leaf tea has a lot to do with the benefits from it, right? Yeah. So with the CTC method, which again, 75% of the world's tea, a lot of that undergoes the CTC method because it's black tea, right?

Yeah. But you get like this powdery chopped up little bitty substance and it's put into a bag and it forms a little clump and water doesn't circulate as well. The benefit of loose leaf tea is that the water steeps through and circulates amongst the tea leaves more. I think it seeps through. Man, I think you're right. But it circulates among the tea leaves and the tea leaves, remember, especially depending

on the type of tea, may have been pressed so that the oils are trapped, dehydrated on the surface of the tea leaf. If you chop those things up and turn them into dust, you're going to lose a lot of that stuff. But if you have just a dried tea leaf that is dehydrated and has the moisture on the outside and some water rehydrates that and it just kind of stirs it up and gets into the colloid and you drink that, bam, you're going to get, if there are health benefits which we'll explore, you're more likely to get them from that loose leaf tea than a bag

tea. Agreed. And then, of course, you also have your iced tea here in the south, sweet iced tea. Yeah. Which is delicious to me because I grew up here, a lot of people think it's weird. They had been drinking iced tea before 1900, but 1904, the St. Louis World's Fair was where it really took off because a guy was selling hot tea named Richard Blachenden. I know, what a name.

And he was... Even if you pronounce it the other way, like Blachenden, it doesn't matter. He sounds like a made up, mad magazine staff writer or something. He was serving free tea, but it was hot and it was really hot and so people were like, no, thanks. So he made it cold and they said, this is delicious. Well, it was hot out in St. Louis that year. Of course.

That's summer. That was where I think hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream cones came from and apparently iced tea. Man, could you imagine like the world changing after that? In St. Louis. So that's where they credit iced tea being born and of course here in the South, like I said, you dump a cup of sugar in there while you're brewing it and it makes it delicious and syrupy sweet.

Did you read the Slate article that was linked to in here? No. I started to. Scott Peacock features in it. Who's that? He used to cook at Watershed. No, no, no. He's good.

Yeah. Good cook. He used to when they compared the hospitality of offering sweet tea to passing a doobie at a fish show and I was like, no, I'm done with this Slate article forever. What? Yeah. What a weird thing to link together. It was that kind of article.

That's so strange because there's like a thousand hospitable things you can mention. I know. You know, out of nowhere. It was very strange. All right. So finally, Josh, health benefits of tea, true or not true? Jury's out, man. Yeah.

So it's possible if the free radical theory of aging is correct, then it's got health benefits and ages, cases. People hear these things a lot like antioxidants, free radicals, and I don't think a lot of people have an understanding of what it is and it's not super complicated. No, it's not and I will explain it on the, on the basis of you agreeing to doing free radicals episode, whole episode. Sure. Okay.

Cool. That was easy. Why would you say it like that? I'm just teasing. Okay. So Chuck, with free radicals, right? We already mentioned oxidation. Yeah.

That's what the free radicals are based on. So you breathe oxygen and that O2 molecule has two unpaired electrons. Well, those electrons want to be paired. So they go into your body and mess with your cells by searching around for other molecules or atoms that they can steal an electron from and repair. That's right. Repair. Get it?

Yeah. But it's actually the opposite of repairing. It's damaging the cells because those atoms that just got their molecules stripped are now looking for their own electrons to pair with, right? That's right. And it causes this chain reaction. Well, the whole free radical theory of aging is that this is why we age. This is where disease comes from.

This is how our system wears down and breaks down. Cellular destruction. Yeah. And we know that this is a real thing. Sure. Like that really happens. The same thing as being exposed to radiation. It's a chain reaction where molecules and atoms just go around charged, looking to neutralize

themselves by pairing their electrons, their charged electrons, right? So what T is lousy with is antioxidants. Yeah. And that's what people hear that word a lot and don't even know what it is. It basically is just going to slow down that oxidation process because they can give up their electrons and still be fine. Exactly. Like vitamin C.

Yeah. Which is, which is found in high amounts in T. Yeah. Beta-carotene. Yeah. Vitamin E. Just basically anything that you see is an antioxidant. Probably is an antioxidant. Again, the jury is just out now based on some recent studies that have found.

We don't know if this is actually a good thing. Well, yeah. And when it comes to T, they, people think basically it's, A, certainly not going to hurt you. Right. And B, it's probably helping you, but we just don't know exactly how and it's not all super confirmed. Right.

But drink T and eat fruits and vegetables because antioxidants, we think are pretty good for you. Right. Because it is correlated with a bunch of health benefits. It's correlated with a reduction in diabetes. Yeah. It's correlated with a reduction in, I think, everything. Light pressure.

Yeah. Lung cancer. The lowered risk of lung cancer. Heart disease. Cholesterol. Yeah. Just tons of stuff. There's all these correlations out.

They've never proven definitively that it's not that people who drink T tend to also lead healthier lifestyles and that it's something else, but there's a lot of evidence there that drinking T does have some sort of healthful benefits or at the very least, it's not going to hurt you. Yeah. When, when they say it's, they associate it with good health, then that's a pretty good sign that you're doing the right thing. Yeah.

And there it can't say, we can prove this because this does this. Yeah. And we know it for sure. Right. So if that free radical theory of aging is true, is correct, and antioxidants are actually good for you, then the T you want to go for to drink is the green T. Because that's the one that has the highest concentrations of catechins, which include epicatechin, epicatechin gallate, epicalocatacin, epicalocatacin gallate, which is known as EGCG and has a lot of gall.

I thought that was kind of funny, but in black tea has these, but they actually convert to other stuff. They're kind of like dumb down versions. So green tea, again, it sounds like if you really want health benefits, if there are health benefits, you want to drink loose leaf green tea. With matcha. Right. With a matcha chaser.

Exactly. Tea also does contain caffeine. I don't know why people, some people think it doesn't, or that it contains very little. I've heard people say that before, like, you know, coffee's got caffeine. Tea doesn't have caffeine. Yeah. Tea's got plenty of caffeine. Sure.

But generally not as much as coffee. Coffee contains about 80 to 120 milligrams for a mug, and tea's going to have 20 to 60, with black being the strongest at about 30 to 40 milligrams, and green tea and wulong between 10 and 20 milligrams. White tea has like 1% of the caffeine of a cup of coffee. I want to give a shout out to my coffee, too, by the way. You know what we're on the cusp of, don't you? No.

The USDA advising Americans to drink up to five cups of coffee a day. And America right now drinks less than two a day on average, and the USDA is about to say, you need to more than double your coffee consumption because it's not only not bad for you, it's good for you. Finally. On the cusp. Everyone is realizing. Well, there's a group that's, I can't remember the name of it, but they come up with the

guidelines for our diets, and it's this panel that's part of the USDA, exactly. The start chamber says, actually, we should start drinking a lot more coffee. And the USDA rarely ignores the advice of the panels. So we're on the cusp of the USDA saying, go drink more coffee, everybody. And everyone will be like, Josh was right. He's the only guy drinking coffee before this announcement. Even I don't drink five cups a day on average. Really?

Not anymore? I'm trying to step it up. We may have started drinking more coffee lately, actually, because we've got a little machine here now that. That machine is dynamite. Yeah. What I do is I hit the regular coffee button and then add a shot of espresso because that makes it the right size and strength.

Right. Because the regular cup of coffee is, it's not even the three quarters of my mug. I know. And it's not even a big mug. Yeah. It's not like I have some giant mug. No. That's your tea mug.

Yeah. Yeah. You can punch through a concrete wall with that coffee with the espresso shot on top. Yeah. It's good though. If you want to know more about tea, go drink some tea. You can also type tea, T-E-A, into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this left-handed feedback and boy, did we get a lot of it. I don't know why. I guess sometimes when you segment a certain part of the population, they're going to respond. Especially one that's been so mistreated for so many, so many years. Yeah. Because we heard from a lot of twins and redheads when we covered that stuff. Yeah.

But boy, we heard from a lot of lefties. They're a proud people, as it turns out. Hey guys, I am left-handed. When I was little, my mom made me use scissors with only my right hand because of my aunt, my mother's sister, who is also left-handed. She's very into sewing, and left-handed sewing scissors are crazy expensive, or at least they were back then. They're not as bad now.

In order to avoid the same ordeal, they thought it would just be better to teach me to cut with my right hand to never buy the expensive left-handed scissors of any kind. Boo, hiss. I still have mixed feelings about this, but I don't think it harmed me. We did hear from a lot of people who were forced into right-handedness from parents or teachers or whatever. Yeah, it was a thing. A totes thing.

It's so bizarre. I think there was a concerted, widespread effort to eradicate left-handed people. One thing you only mentioned briefly, though, in the right-hand dominance is with things like scissors and spiral-bound notebooks, I'd also like to point out less obvious ones like which side the paper is on in bathrooms. You never thought about that. Yeah. It's on the left, though, in most bathrooms, isn't it?

Yes, it is, but that makes sense. But I reach over with my right hand to tear the paper. I know, but you're different. Doorknobs, computer mouse, or mice, and the smearingness of pens all can cause issues for lefties. Anyway, love the podcast, guys, and especially ones about people like me. So Sharon in Soana, Tennessee, what else about you can we talk about on a podcast? Yeah, let us know.

And if you have something about you that you think would make a cool podcast, a whole podcast, let us know. What if she wrote back and was like, oh, gosh, I love lasagna and I hate dogs and I drive a... A Datsun? I drive a Datsun. Do a podcast on that. On the Datsun?

Datsun drivers. Well, yeah. Let us know, Sharon. Right? It was Sharon, right? Sharon. And other people out there who aren't Sharon, let us know, too, if you have any ideas. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can post on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. And you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. We find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.