Using a French Press to Brew Tea

Video Transcript

"Ok I'm going to show you how to use your French Press to brew a cup of tea, and they make large and small French Presses. The great thing about how French Press works, is once you have your tea inside, you can plunge this plunger down. It actually retards the steeping action a little bit, so you can leave it in here and you're now going to have to worry about it continuing to steep. Most of your liquid is still up here. We're going to be making a Ruabis Chi that I've already measured. I'm making it for myself and two friends, so we're going to do three teaspoons right into the French Press. Then we're going to add three cups of water. This is where knowing your equipment comes in really handy, because I've used this French Press enough times to know that right up to about here is going to be the three cups that I need to serve my friends and I. So that was all the way boiling water out of my tea kettle. Just did that on the stove. What I like to do is raise the plunger up and down two or three times. As you see, that's mixing the tea with the water really good. I leave it up while it's steeping. The great thing about steeping in a French Press is you actually get to watch the tea steep, and you can see it take on its darker color. It's a good way to tell how much time is right for you with that particular tea. A good thing to have on hand is an alarm clock or a kitchen timer, and for this Aruabis, we're going to set it for anywhere from five to ten minutes. I'm going to give it five minutes. After that five minutes is passed, you plunge it down, and ideally you want to go ahead and pour it into your friends' cups right away. But again, since we've plunged it down, if it sits in the press a little bit longer, that's going to be ok. That's how you use a French Press to make loose tea."