Struggle in the Steam Age

"This is the result of your research?" Lawrence looked curiously at the two small bags that Nora took out from behind. In one of the small bags, you could see some dried tea leaves that were roughly striped and full of folds. The contents of the other small bag didn't even look like the tea leaves in his impression, but just some red-brown powdery items with very coarse particles.

"That's it. This is the best solution I chose after experimenting with hundreds of methods last night." Nara quickly explained after looking at Lawrence's expression, "Don't look at these two packages. It doesn’t look good, but I have tried brewing and it tastes really good. The reason why these tea leaves become like this is because my special fermentation method guarantees the taste but cannot guarantee their quality.”

"You should be black tea." After watching for more than ten seconds, Lawrence realized what this kind of tea is. In his memory, no matter where the world is sold, all the tea is sold. It is green tea, and there is no such thing as black tea. So when I saw these powdered tea leaves before, I really didn’t think of other tea drinking methods besides green tea.

Unlike Lawrence's last life, different regions have different tea drinking methods. There is only one type of green tea in this world. The method of drinking tea has also been unified into the green tea brewing method of the Aurora Empire. There is no such variety of tea varieties and drinking methods in previous lives.

After a few simple thoughts, Lawrence also probably understood why the two worlds have such a big difference in the way of drinking tea. The reason is very simple, it is because there is magic in this world. So that it can solve many problems that were difficult to solve in ancient times in a world like Lawrence.

For example, in the world of Lawrence's previous life, the reason why Westerners drank black tea was because they discovered that the shelf life of green tea was very short after being exposed to eastern green tea in the early days, and it was difficult to store and transport it back to their hometown for a long time. So they can only choose black tea that can be stored for a long time after fermentation. Then I was lucky to find another way to drink tea that suits me, and finally made black tea popular in the West.

The issue of keeping fresh tea leaves was not completely resolved until later generations, which affected many things. For example, Lawrence remembers that in his previous life, some varieties of Pu'er tea, which were fermented teas, were fired at sky-high prices and became luxury items. The price of green tea is far lower than these black teas.

The reason for this is because a very important feature of luxury goods is that they require value preservation. Regrettably, green tea is often only the freshest tea that year is the most valuable, and then it will continue to depreciate over time. But black tea does not have this weakness and can be stored for a long time.

However, in this world, magical abilities can make green tea stored for dozens or even hundreds of years as fresh as it was when it was first stored. As a luxury drink from afar, using magic to keep tea fresh is obviously a worthwhile thing.

This has also led to the fact that the tea in this world has not encountered the complicated preservation problems of Lawrence's last world from the beginning. The next thing is that the brewing and drinking methods from the East have completely unified the whole world. As a result, even the most elegant elves have chosen the drinking method from the East, but the drinking procedure is a little more complicated, and it has the so-called elves' elegance.

But today, when facing a large area of ​​central hilly area, there is no way to brew tea as green tea. Nora thought of the fermented black tea of ​​the previous life. She felt that the phenolic substances and caffeine that produced astringency and bitterness in these teas might be solved by fermentation.

Naturally, the experiment was not smooth. Not only did it fail to reduce the bitterness and astringency at the beginning, but the tea became more bitter due to over-fermentation or fermentation failure, and sometimes a lot of unpleasant rancidity was mixed into it. Fortunately, the puppet can use her magical power to accurately control the fermentation environment, and at the same time she can accurately determine the components of the tea. So it took just a few hundred tests to get the current finished product.

After being sent a small pot of boiling water, Lawrence waited for the boiling water to drop to about 85°C and used them to brew the first kind of black tea. Unlike green tea, in his impression, the water temperature needed to brew black tea is higher. After waiting for three to five minutes after the brewing was over, a cup of tea soup appeared in front of him. The color of the tea soup is bright orange and red, and the noodle soup has a golden halo, which looks like a golden crown.

"This tea seems to have a certain fruity scent, it smells very pleasant." After reading the color of the tea soup, he moved his nose to the cup and sniffed, Lawrence said to Nora beside him, waiting for the temperature of the tea soup. After lowering slightly, he took a sip from the teacup. "It has a faint aroma and a very mellow taste. By the way, what happened to your other pack of powdered black tea?"

"These powdered black teas are made from the older leaves in the tea, and the flavor is stronger." Nora said and flew out, and after a while she flew in with a can of milk. "At the beginning of the production, I always tried to make these older leaves with greater yields to be as suitable for drinking as the previous kind of tea, but later I found that if I increase the fermentation to remove the bitterness , The unique fragrance of tea is gone."

"So I tried to change my mind, and then I thought of English afternoon tea. The black tea is drunk with milk and sugar, which can accentuate the flavor through the taste of milk and sugar and reduce the unpleasant bitterness. ."

"Milk tea, I haven't drunk it for a long time." Lawrence whispered as he watched the puppet use magic to start brewing those powdered tea leaves, although he was worried about the number of times he drank milk tea with sugar in his previous life. Rarely, but now when I go to a foreign country, I start to miss that taste. "By the way, do you say that milk tea is poured into the tea, or is it poured into the milk?"

"Uh-" After hearing the question that Lawrence suddenly popped out, Nora said with a slow motion and turned her head. "If I remember correctly, even in the UK, where this method of drinking tea is the most popular, there is no final result in dispute."

"From a more scientific point of view, according to a 2003 paper by the Royal Society of Chemistry ~www.ltnovel.com~ it should be hot tea is poured into cold milk. Because if milk is poured into hot tea, the protein in milk It will be denatured, the bitter taste of tea will not disappear, and the protein will deteriorate when heated, and it will be easy to solidify. Not only will the taste no longer be smooth, but also hydrogen sulfide will be produced, giving off a milky smell;"

"On the contrary, if the tea is poured into cold milk, the bitterness and astringency will disappear, because the temperature of the tea and milk will not be higher than the temperature at which the protein denatures at least initially, so the protein can complex with tannins. "

"However, traditionally, the British aristocrats prefer to inject cold milk into hot tea, believing that it can avoid adding too much or too little milk. More importantly, this method has a stronger cultural blessing. The Queen of England is from this faction."

"Then let's add tea to cold milk, after all, from a scientific point of view, it tastes better when brewed like this." Lawrence said after thinking for a while. "As for tradition, no one in this world except the two of us knows how the British drink tea, and they don't even know what Britain is. And the method we use is tradition."

"You're right." Nora filtered the brewed tea with a strainer from the laboratory, then poured it into milk, and then poured it into two cups, one large and one small. "Good drink is the most important thing, after all, it is just a drink anyway."