I’ve become addicted to my Bonavita Gooseneck kettle. I can set the thing to bring water to almost any temperature I want above 60C (why that’s the limit, nobody knows) and it’ll keep it there. I can’t make tea without it, which is why I decided to make this video.
Turns out there are established ways to manage this. The Japanese have it pretty well figured out to the point where it’s on most tea packaging you find in the country. Well I wanted to give it a shot and film the results, so here we go.
Equipment
- Bonavita Gooseneck Kettle, 1L
- Kitchen Thermometer
- Pyrex Glass Measuring Cup
- Chawan
Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Tea Letter. You’re watching a video on how to control your water temperature without a temperature controlled kettle. So what I’ve got here in front of me is a Pyrex glass measuring cup. I’ve got a simple kitchen thermometer, I’ve got towel for cleanup because I’m a Klutz and my matchable here as well as my kettle over here. I don’t know if you can see it on screen and the kettle’s got some boiling hot water in it already. So that’s ready to go.
I just want to walk through the process as if I were making a bowl of matcha for myself and I needed to get the water ready, but I didn’t have a way to set it to precisely the correct temperature.
If you watched my other video on how to make matcha from home, in that video, I used water that was 80 degrees Celsius or about 177 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s what we’ll be shooting for in terms of water temperature in this video here today.
The process is very simple: you just want to take the boiling water that you’ve got from the kettle, straight off the stove or whatever and pour it into this intermediate sort of vessel. And I do recommend either glass or ceramic because if you use plastic or metal, it can add flavorings and stuff to the water that will impact the flavor of the tea at the end. And we just want to make sure that we’re getting that pure quality tea experience without, you know, any, any other undesirable flavors.
So I’ve got my glass measuring cup here, I’ve got my boiling hot water, and what I’m going to do is just use this thermometer to (if you don’t have this thermometer, it’s fine; I’m doing this just for demonstration purposes) but I just want to see, you know, what happens to the water temperature as we go from boiling hot kettle to room temperature glass. And you’ll see it really doesn’t take that much time at all. Again, the target temperature that we’re shooting for here is about 80C or 177 degrees Fahrenheit.
Let’s go.
I’m going to go for about, oh, it’s a little more than half a cup of water because again, we don’t need much for the matcha. And immediately we’ve dropped from 210 degrees Fahrenheit to 182 Fahrenheit. So in just a matter of seconds, we’re basically already at our brewing temperature and Bingo one 77. How long did that take? Five. 10 seconds. And it’s still dropping. So if I were going to be making the matcha right now, I would simply take this boiling hot water, pour it in here, and wait just a few seconds and then immediately pour it into my chawan here to make my tea.
And that’s, you can see it really took no time at all. And um, you know, if you’re out of the house, you don’t have access to something like a measuring cup, maybe you’ve got like a, um, like a travel water bottle with you or something like that. You can also use that as an intermediate step maybe if you’re in a hotel or something like that.
You know, whatever, whatever you gotta do. There’s perfect and then there’s practical. So use whatever you’ve got around you to help control that temperature, but just know that this is all it takes for you to go from boiling hot water to water that’s ready to make a bowl of matcha.
So I think that’ll do it for this video. If you’ve got any other questions about water temperature and how to control it, leave them in the comments down below.
If you’d like to get more information on tea, you can check out my blog at thetletter.com find me on Instagram where I like to hang out, posting pictures and talking about @thetealetter. As always, I hope you have a wonderful day and happy drinking.
