Why, oh, why didn�??t I study more chemistry at school. Truth be told, I just hated the subject, but some chemical knowledge would come in handy to answer a burning tea question.

The rec.food.drink.tea group has been debating whether reboiling water affects the taste of your tea, and how. Now, every tea book I know says that you should use freshly drawn water to make tea and reboiling it is a major no-no. But I have recently read Hervé This�?? book, Molecular Gastronomy : Exploring the Science of Flavor. This is France�??make that the world�??s�??leading expert in molecular gastronomy and, beakers in hand, he has proved that many culinary practices guaranteed to improve the flavor of food are little more than myth. His book set me thinking. What if some of the standard practices in tea-making were also a myth? What if you can happily reboil water?

A search on the Internet bore no fruit. Some sites suggest that reboiling water deprives it of oxygen, so the resulting tea tastes flat�??but others say that most of the oxygen goes with the first boiling and repeated boilings make little difference. Other sites say that reboiling water increases the concentration of mineral, which is not only detrimental to a good cuppa, but also to your health. But then again others maintain that, as you reboil water, minerals precipitate to the bottom of the kettle or pot and the resulting water will be purer. Now, this again could affect the taste of tea�??but how much? I know that the limestone build-up in my kettle is so much worse when I reboil water than when I don�??t, but I am not sure how that is going to affect flavor.

To try and solve the conundrum, I set up a little test, making tea with freshly drawn tap water and some Darjeeling GFOP. Then I reboiled the leftover water and made another tea�??also with Darjeeling GFOP, using the same spoon, colander, steeping times and type of cup. I tasted the two teas blind and found the one made with reboiled water had a marginally more pronounced flavor than the other one�??but then I might have given it a marginally longer steeping time without realising it. Other then that, I could tell no major difference.

I suspect that a single reboil isn�??t going to alter water�??s chemical composition so much to have a discernible impact on taste. But reboiling several times might. Since the question still teases my mind, I put finger to keyboard and asked the expert�??Hervé This himself. I am now hoping he will get back to me and shed some light on this once and for all.

UPDATE: I heard back from This, who was incredibly kind and replied quickly to my fairly out of the blue email. He says that there is no doubt that ions are very important to the taste of water. So if the concentration of these ions increases through multiple boiling, this could definitely affect the taste of said water�??and hence of tea. He wasn’t too sure about the impact of dissolved gases. Either way, he suggested running an experiment by filling three vessels�??two with water that has boiled once and one with water that has been repeatedly boiled�??and asking several people to identify the two identical ones. It’s an interesting one. I plan to set it up and report results.

Time to confess. I often drink commodity tea–from tea bags. It usually happens when I am hard at work and pushed for time. I either make myself some fast-brewing loose leaf greens, such as Sencha or Gyokuro, or I resort to teabags.

When this happens, I usually reach for Twinings Classics Teabags. But lately, I have been looking around for different stuff. And I have now found some tea bags which work rather well for me–Dilmah’s Watte range, a series of teas from Ceylon. I have become rather partial to Ran Watte, which is high-grown tea from the slopes of Nuwara Eliya. Dilmah touts it as the Champagne of teas–which is a rather abused description I have heard applied liberally to Darjeeling as well as high-grown Ceylon. I find it yields an elegant, smooth brew which is light at first impact but with a long finish.

It doesn’t rate up to properly made loose leaf tea–but it is instant drinking at its best.

Say tea and I�??ll think black. So ingrained is my prejudice that I forget the vast majority of the world drinks green tea. Which is why a message on Adagio�??s TeaChat forum took me aback yesterday. Posted by a green tea lover, it asked for suggestions to move into black tea. And I suddenly realized it never occurred to me anyone could ask this question. It just goes to show just how much my palate is influenced by my culture and place of origin.

Anyhow, it was fun to turn my prejudice on its head and start thinking�??if I had only drunk green and wanted to move into black, what would I have? My answer, like many other posters suggested in that thread, was to choose oolong. Oolong is a somewhat neglected tea�??Joe Simrany of Tea USA once told me that it is only drunk by 2 percent of the world�??s tea drinking population�??which I think is a shame. Most oolongs make fabulous drinking. The one I am drinking now, Whittard�??s Formosa Imperial Phoenix Oolong, is lovely, with light but round mouthfeel and a delicately sweet flavor. Oh, and I read somewhere that it helps fight aging.

But what�??s perhaps more interesting for someone wanting to move into black tea is that oolongs come in several degrees of oxidation. This means you can slowly adjust your green-geared tastebuds by going from a very lightly oxidized one�??closer to green tea�??to a highly oxidized one�??closer to black. Indeed, some of the more highly oxidized oolongs were developed specifically for the export market to satisfy black-tea-shaped Western palates like mine.

The concept obviously works just as well in the reverse�??you can drink oolong as a way to move from black to green. So did I follow my own advice and drink it when I made my first forays in the world of greens? Nope. Soft landings are not for me�??I belong to the sink or swim school. I jumped straight into Gunpowder (the green tea, rather than the explosive type). And you know what, it worked for me because it suddenly opened my eyes to a whole new gamut of tastes that I wanted to explore. Maybe I should have suggested to that green tea lover at TeaChat to take the plunge and start drinking Irish Breakfast.

My mother took a sip of the Darjeeling and Oolong blend I made for her last Christmas and mulled over it a little.

�??It�??s very good,�?� she said.

I braced myself for the �??but�?� I knew would inevitably follow.

�??But not as good as that Keemun,�?� she said.

Ah, that Keemun. A Roi du Keemun, to be precise, and royalty it was indeed. A deep red, round, sweet brew with a satisfying floral aroma.

We bought together from Mariage Frerès when we took a trip to Paris six years ago. Since then, it has been the benchmark for every other tea my mother has. And no one ever really measures up. After years of drinking only Darjeeling, Assam and Ceylon, my attempts to broaden her horizons turned my mother into a bit of a Keemun convert, but even other Keemuns we tried fell short of the Mariage Frerès standard.

She can�??t really point out what made that tea so special, except saying that whenever she had a cup she wanted to have more. If it were a book, critics would call this compulsive need for more the Keemun�??s reserve of vitality�??it remains alive and attractive to you because you want to go back to it and explore its every nuance. My mother simply calls it that tea with a dreamy note in her voice.

Good daughter that I am, I going to buy her some Roi du Keemun from Mariage Frerès�?? online shop for her birthday. It won�??t be identical to that one of course. Much like wine, tea changes every year, depending on the weather, the conditions of the soil and the human vagaries of plucking and processing. But I suspect that even if it were identical, it still wouldn�??t rate up to that Keemun. Because, over the years, that tea has acquired the delicious taste of good memories.

I am usually rather wary of flowery reviews that tell me a tea has hints of banana or underripe tomato. The truth is these descriptions hugely depend on the reviewer’s frame of gustatory reference. And because they are so subjective and hardly ever give me an indication on whether I would actually like to drink that tea.

I remember once reading a wine tasting report which defined a particular wine as tasting of wilted flowers and soaked prunes. Well, I haven’t got a clue what wilted flowers taste of–let alone whether I’d like to find traces of it in my glass. Sometimes, these descriptors trigger mental pictures that can be outright offputting. I remember once an olive oil tasting where the producer was terribly keen to tell us that his oil had apricot notes. Suddenly I had this vision of drizzling apricot juice all over my salad and the thought was hardly appealing.

But then one such flowery description happened on me. I was drinking a cup of Sencha when it hit me. Its scent evoked strong childhood memories of a sun-drenched hillside covered with wild irises. Now I can’t manage to shake it off. No matter how else I try to define it, Sencha for me tastes of wild irises in summer. So I now have a lot more understanding for flowery reviewers.