Brewing Decaffeinated Tea

Video Transcript

"Okay, now I'd like to talk to you about decaffeinated teas. If you buy decaffeinated tea at the store, more than likely, they put it through some sort of chemical process to remove the caffeine from the dry tea leaves. You don't want extra chemicals in your tea. So I'm here to tell you a way that you can enjoy every variety of tea (there's three thousand of them) decaffeinated. So you're ready for bed and you want a nice warm, soothing cup of tea but you don't want the stimulation of caffeine. You could drink an African red tea, because it has no caffeine, or a Tsane, an herbal infusion that has no caffeine, but if you're looking to enjoy a green, black or white tea that does have caffeine in it naturally, you're going to want to remove the caffeine. And I'm going to show you a simple way to do that. The fact is, when you're steeping tea, or brewing tea, the caffeine is released into the water in the first thirty seconds to a minute of steeping. So what I'll do... say I want to enjoy a black tea with milk before bedtime. I'll put my black tea in my infuser, or teapot, and add hot water, just like I'm going to steep my cup of tea, bing water for black teas of course. And then I'll wait thirty seconds. So after thirty seconds to a minute has passed, the caffeine has been released into the tea that's steeping in your cup. And so what you'll do then is pull the diffuser out of your tea and discard the water, or the tea that's steeping in your cup. If you're using a teapot, you'll just pour out all the water. And then reinsert your diffuser; add fresh water to the pot, and then steep for your desired steeping time, depending on what kind of tea you're making. And the tea in that cup will be, at the end of that time, will be caffeine free."