Tea is just leaf in water, right?

    • SnortsGarlicPowder@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      8 hours ago

      What am I if I think tea must have leaves in it but added non leaf things doesn’t stop it being tea? Gutter water is definitely tea. I guess a stew made with a bay leaf is also tea. Coffee is made from beans so is coffee not tea.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    15 hours ago

    I’d say no, based on a few factors.

    First, any plant matter that gets into the water is heated. Second, it will only get in there after the water has had smoke go through it, warning the liquid above ambient.

    Third, since the steeping would occur with adulterants, is it really a tea/tisane at all? Typically, anything other than prepared plant matter being added during a cold brew is going to interfere with steeping, so having the ash, tars, and residual resins/terpenes/etc in the water beforehand seems less like a tea and more like a stock.

    And, yeah, you can argue that a stock isn’t super dissimilar from a tea, but you can’t cold brew a stock. Too many of the things in there won’t get into suspension, or dissolve without heat. Even in vegetable stock.

    Fourth, unless you’re broke, you aren’t going to be smoking much leaf, there’s supposed to be mostly bud in there. While you can make a tea from flowers, tea tea isn’t predominantly flower of the camellia.

    So, as a shower thought, this is fucking awesome. It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

  • nocturne@sopuli.xyz
    14·
    18 hours ago

    You do not put what you are smoking through a bong in the water. It is outside in a bowl. The smoke is pulled through the water and out into your lungs. It is more like a water based cigarette filter.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      16 hours ago

      Yeah, though at this point, I think that’s becoming less useful. Tisane as a term is essentially dead outside of very niche circles, and tea has replaced it in pretty much all common usage. This, btw, isn’t me disagreeing with you, it’s an expansion on the subject.

      At some point, with the word tea not being a formal scientific term, it being technically correct only for one plant type starts to not be true. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s moving that direction.

      But, that’s going to be a long time. We’re still at the point where you have to specify if you want tea from other plants by prefixing the type of plant with it, while camellia is the default. But it is starting to be a thing where more and more people think of tea as a brewed/steeped product rather than an infusion of one plant.

      What I wonder is if it’ll be something like where people call chai chai tea, and we’ll have to order tea tea lol.

      It’s been a thing in my lifetime where some people weren’t even aware that anything other than black tea exists. Here in the mountains of the us, if it wasn’t iced sweet tea, you were drinking some kind of herbal tea hot. There was no green tea, and finding anyone that knew that there was more than one type of black tea was unusual. Now, our little town has a tea shop with maybe thirty types of camellia products ranging from white to green to black, different varieties, all kinds of stuff.

      Gonna be interesting how the language of it shifts. I won’t likely live long enough to see it change all the way though