Refinements to the Black Drink Recipe

As an update to my last blog entry, I tried a couple of modifications to the recipe in the last post in order to see if I could make a smoother tea without as much of an aftertaste, and also in order to clarify quantities and measurements.

Based on the success of my last experiment, which I have concluded actually used about 1/3 cup for about 2 1/2 cups of water, I settled on a larger quantity (since the process takes time, so I might as well make a larger batch) of both leaves and water.  Using dried, unbroken leaves, I measured out exactly 1 cup of leaves which would eventually be boiled in 2 quarts (8 cups) of water.  This ratio (1:8 leaves to water volume) produced excellent results.

The next step was to parch the leaves as before in a cast iron skillet. My first major adjustment was to parch the leaves on a lower heat (around 7 or 8 in a scale of 10), keep them even more constantly in motion by stirring, and pull them off the heat before they got too blackened.  I found that this was very straightforward to do, allowing the leaves to parch until about half of them had turned mostly brown (not black), with the rest still in the process of turning from green to brown (as pictured below).

Next, following the historic accounts in the previous blog post, I crushed these parched leaves up into small bits by hand in a large bowl before putting them in the water to boil.  This reduced the volume to about 1/3 cup of crushed leaves (from 1 cup of uncrushed leaves).

Crushing up the leaves also seems to have been pivotal in exposing more of the leaves to the boiling water, which produced a somewhat different result than was the case last time when I boiled the uncrushed leaves directly. Below are the crushed leaves beginning to boil.

After the crushed leaves soaked up the water and sank, the concoction initially looked the same as last time, basically a black-brown boiling tea.

I let this mixture boil for a total of about 1 hour and 15 minutes, but when I added fresh (though hot) water to the tea after about an hour, a light frothy foam developed on top, which persisted even after the tea came to a boil again, and right to the end.  Below is the initial foam.

And below is the later stage.

Once the tea was removed from the heat, I poured it through a fine sieve into a large bowl in order to catch the tiny bits of crushed leaves that hadn't already sunk to the bottom.

Finally, when I ladled some of the tea into the same white cup as before, it seems to have obtained nearly the same degree of darkness as when I parched the leaves much longer (and blacker), showing that the leaves need not be charred to produce a cassina tea that can effectively be called the "black drink."

Moreover, the taste seemed even richer (maybe the foam has something to do with this?), and virtually all the aftertaste was gone (though very mild bitterness still remains in the bottom of the cup, not dissimilar from some of the stronger regular teas).  I added simple cane sugar instead of honey this time, and it was more than excellent as a fine, aromatic tea.  It's definitely on par with commercial teas, in my opinion, and pretty easy to make once you've got the routine down.  When the weather warms up, I'm going to see how well it does as iced tea...this is a Southern drink, after all!