![]() Tea type is mostly irrelevant to caffeine content. All teas have similar caffeine content. Time to run some experiments with our old tree tea cakes, eh? But ask any pu’er lover and they’ll swear it’s a thing. Still, there is no hard evidence to substantiate this. The idea is that older tea trees-some verifiably several hundred years old-have deep reaching roots able to extract more nutrients from the soil, and that the terroirs these trees are normally found in are naturally biodiverse with rich soils, enhancing the effect. This state is often described as a feeling of pleasant airiness and joviality, and is said to be the result of a tea’s cha qi or “tea energy”. ![]() There’s a popular theory about the effects of drinking tea from older trees, namely that they can get you “tea drunk”. ![]() Gushu / laocong / old tree tea contains more caffeine. Theine (the term for caffeine found in tea, you recall) and coffee caffeine are exactly the same, but tea’s many additional cofactors change the way you perceive caffeine’s effects. Tea caffeine is different than coffee caffeine. It all depends on leaf weight, water temperature, extraction time, and the unique biology of different tea plants.) (Really, any version of the sentence “_ tea has more/less caffeine than _ tea” is probably false. White tea has the most caffeine. The chart! Green tea has more caffeine than black tea. Nope. There are other persistent myths about tea. Steeping parameters-that's tea weight, water temperature, and steep time-are what make most of the difference in extracted caffeine content. Here's a handy chart that breaks it all down: One of the great misconceptions in tea is that different types contain different amounts of caffeine. But why-and why does the tea plant have it at all? And it’s important to know if you’re drinking true tea, as it has health implications. The French tisane is a more correct and useful word. Tea leaves blended with non-tea plants could rightly be called “herbal tea”, but that would confuse the rest of us who think of peppermint and chamomile as herbal tea. This caffeine conversation is one reason we do battle against that resilient misnomer: “herbal tea”. They may stimulate (Ever tried aged white ginseng? □), but not in the coffee-jitters sense. But in general, non-tea plants have no caffeine. Well, some do yaupon, yerba mate, guayasa, guarana, cascara, and the list probably goes on. Tisanes-or, liquid extractions of non-tea plants, like herbs and flowers-contain no caffeine. And while the chemical makeup of each tea is unique, caffeine is a relative constant. About half a cup of coffee’s worth, in fact. Unless your tea is pressure cooked with carbon monoxide (how “decaf” is made) or thoroughly roasted (eg houjicha), it has caffeine. Tea-that is, a liquid extraction of the botanical constituents in dried tea plant, genus Camellia-contains caffeine. No way to know, and we don’t deal in folklore or speculation.) Probably what ol’ Shen was experiencing when he wrote this thousands of years ago were the stimulating effects of caffeine (coupled with the entourage effect of other psychotropic cofactors in ancient tea trees…maybe. "Tea comforts the spirit, banishes passivity, lightens the body, and adds sparkle to the eyes."
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