On 21 Aug 2005 14:28:12 -0700, "Space Cowboy" >
wrote:

>You need to drink more types of tea and then come back in 30 years and
>give us your answer versus the amount of caffeine in multiple infusions
>as a general rule.

I do believe I have paid the price of admission Jim. Just because I
have a website about puerh doesn't mean I don't drink other teas. I
drink a lot of them. I now drink so much Shincha/Sencha/Gyokuro that I
order them directly from Japan, I drink a lot of the same Yunnan teas
you describe, I drink a lot of oolongs as well although I have not
developed a full appreciation for them yet, I also drink the
occasional first flush cream of the crop Indian teas thanks to some
friends of mine. So please lets just debate the facts.

> Some teas maintain their astringency after several
>infusions and for a few it even gets worse. That means the caffeine is
>still present while the taste is gone. It is easily reproducible in
>some cases by drinking the first infusion then drinking the second a
>while later and noting the physical characteristcs like the jitters,
>sweating, alertness, palpatations, etc. I say that in general where
>there is taste there is caffeine.

Here is the fallacy of your assumptions. You make it sound like you
can measure caffeine content strictly by taste, I sincerely doubt that
your taste buds are that calibrated. Astringency does not "equal"
caffeine content. Caffeine is bitter but so are a lot of other things.
Just because a tea is astringent does NOT mean that caffeine is the
source of that astringency. Caffeine is NOT proportional to total
flavor, it is but one component that has been proven to dissolve
quicker than most others. There may be trace amounts left in the 8th
steep but percentage wise it is almost negligible. Now I do agree that
in some teas there enough "other" components that get extracted with a
hot rinse to make them taste bland however that is not the case with
puerh. I also would assume that you could play with the temperature to
find a happy medium in those cases.

<snip>

>It
>is the cultivar and not some given rate of caffeine solution for all
>teas. Duh.

To look only at the cultivars is to look at the issue in a vacuum. The
brewing method, length of steep, temperature of water, size and age of
the leaf, all have an effect on caffeine content and extraction.

Once again, the "original thread" here was that you can decaffeinate
tea to a large degree by flushing it with hot water, you have offered
no proof to the contrary other than to deviate from the topic. I
cannot quote precise quantities because that would require laboratory
equipment that most of us don't have but all existing data from
existing research back up this method.

Mike Petro
http://www.pu-erh.net
"In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed."
Samuel Johnson, 1775, upon finishing his dictionary.