Let’s say that it halves with each cycle. Each consecutive steeping produces half the flavour of the last. With each pouring, the drink more closely resembles water. Eventually, water is all that this drink will have become. The exponential decay curve. Pretty normal.
In fact, this is rather a pessimistic outlook for green tea. There’s drop off, but each infusion surely matches more than 70 percent of the previous infusion. And the observation of today’s Strainer is that, although the taste profile of each infusion worsens as well as the taste intensity, people somehow do cling onto the same clutch of leaves for quite a long time.
If we were to try something similar with Coca Cola; drinking 30 percent then topping-up with water, drinking another 30 percent then topping-up with more water, we would soon tire of that drink.
Finish the Coke first, then drink some water if you’re still thirsty. I know that’s what you’re thinking.
Coca Cola being the well-guarded property that it is, the dilution scenario isn’t one we often have to confront. But with cordial or syrup, what I knew in my childhood as “squash”, we frequently are exposed to versions of a drink outside the intended concentration window.
As a child, standing on tiptoes across the kitchen sink, I was fascinated that I could enjoy squash and I could enjoy water… yet slightly-watery-squash or barely-squashy-water could be existentially discomforting. A narrow sweet-spot.
That gap between perfect squash and perfect water wasn’t just a gap; it was a canyon. And by now we’re so close to the concept of the “uncanny valley” you’ll be furious if I don’t come out with it.
The term “uncanny” is used to describe the experience of watching an animated character like those in the Avatar movies. So lifelike are those blue people that any momentary lapse in the illusion, just one frame showing a slightly-unanimated-eye, causes not just jarring awareness but actual discomfort. Donald Duck, his gestures so comfortably-distanced from real people, and from real ducks, triggers no such queasiness. Avatar is my orange squash and Donald Duck is my water.
Well, honestly speaking, I do feel a disappointment, a slight insipidness, when a new cup of green tea contains too few leaves. The analogy holds up there.
But then I do not feel the same disappointment with a cup whose leaves have almost lost their flavour. And this is the surprise.
It’s not just me: Look at all those Didi drivers who nurse the same leaves into 12-hour shifts.
I’m not saying this is a good drink. I’m not suggesting that green tea is genuinely appetising in its eleventh infusion. I’m just observing that, somehow, we tea people do drink it.
If the top-ups were interrupted, if we were to pick up someone else’s eleventh infusion, we would not be impressed with this drink; it would be as a bad as re-lighting an extinguished cigar or returning to that chewing-gum on the bed-post.
But, with green tea, the top-ups are not interrupted. The leaves remain a going concern. It’s like an old jacket one somehow can’t part with, despite knowing how unflattering it has become. A cup of long-since-yellowed green tea is like a part of our body, a part of our day.
And that, surely, is because tea is not just a nice-tasting drink; it is a helper.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, a mild dilation of the capillaries is what we’re here for. That predictable, habitual mild-high is what we green tea users seek.
We get what we seek. Harmlessly, sustainably, we receive.
When duties end, or when it is time to eat, this yellowed clump can be tossed on a convenient tree-stump. But, until that moment, we cleave to these leaves as our very own. This is a truly grown-up addiction.
