The basic idea is the same: use hot water to pull the flavors and whatnot out of some plant matter. So why pour water right through coffee grounds but let tea steep for several minutes?
In: Chemistry
They’re very different though. Coffee is the seed from a fruit while tea is often made up of herbs, leaves… And on rare occasions, mushrooms.
They used to sell coffee in tea bags. I’d see them with camping supplies. It didn’t taste right. I went back to instant for camping.
No idea why, though.
I’m high end coffee bars the pour over Coffee is actually steeped for a set time before it is poured through the filter.
Also certain teas have a very short extraction time but you can steep them multiple times.
French press let’s coffee steep… Not sure since its not in a bag of that makes a difference.
In fact, you do. It depends on how the coffee or tea is prepared beforehand and on the coarseness.
Coarse ground coffee (like for a french press) is let steep for a couple of minutes. Matcha or puh-err tea is ready almost immediately after you pour hot water over it.
I’m a bit unclear on your question – they’re two different drinks, with multiple sub-categories. Take coffee for example… If you consider all the different methods of brewing coffee, for example:
Espresso, French press, drip/filter, boiling grounds with water in a pan then separating (quite common in Sweden) etc…
All these methods give different results. French press will leave you with a lot of the natural oils in the bean, filter/drip will remove these so you get a cleaner brew.
Different coffee beans and roasting levels, and grind fineness will yield different results and require different preparation… French press coffee is generally very coarse and needs steeping before being ready. Espresso on the other hand is extremely fine and the idea is that water is forced through it and then it’s ready very quickly.
As to “why”… That’s just because variety is the spice of life 😉. I generally drink filter but often, usually in the evenings I’ll be in the mood for an espresso… It’s preference.
Edit – re-read your question and realised it was specifically relating to the difference between coffee and tea. I’ll let this sit anyway. Incidentally, there are teapots which operate on the same premise as French press coffee pots.
If you use a tea-bag, you’ll see that steeping is actually pretty sharpish compared to steeping loose-leaf tea, and that has to come down to Surface Area To Volume.
If you grind up Anything it can dissolve faster than the non-ground up stuff because there’s more area on the surface of the particulates to interact with.
Coffee is ground before it’s poured out, and that, beyond exposing thr entirety of the bean and what’s inside, is also to increase its surface area so more of the coffee can get exposed to the water, it’s a pretty similar thing with bagged tea because bagged tea uses “dust”, basically instead of full leaves it uses finely chopped tea which resembles “dust”, hence the name.
With drip-coffee it’s pretty similar to strained tea, so your analogies aren’t far off.
Often they are not – French press coffee and putting a tea bag in a cup of hot water are the same thing.
Coffee is done pour-over/drip style largely for its ease and consistency in flavor. You load the coffee grinds, water, push a button and walk away. Most commercial and retail brands are ground for this style of brewing, because most people have absolutely 0 idea what they’re doing when it comes to making espresso grind for the machine vs coarse grind coffee for a French press vs a grind for a Chemex. There are tons of fancy devices for making coffee, like [this one](https://www.espressoparts.com/6-8-cup-cold-drip-coffee-maker-straight-black-wood-frame-32oz), just think breaking bad level science. They exist because they create the chemically best coffee if you know how to use them properly. Coffee is like wine, it’s pretty damn intense. Nobody has the time to learn about all of that, so pour-over drip coffee just makes it easy for everyone, which is why it’s so popular.
It also doesn’t only last a few seconds – the coffee grinds are usually hot and wet for muuuuuch longer than tea needs to be steeped!
Tea is usually not done this way because it’s a little more specific in the requirements for time and temperature. Most coffee is great brewed between 195° and 205°F, but most herbal teas taste better when they’re brewed at 185°-195° for five minutes, green tea at 170°-175° for 1-2 minutes, so on and so forth.
Most coffee shops don’t have the necessary tools to brew water to the proper temperature for tea in this way. If you’ve ever ordered a green tea and gotten a nasty, bitter cup of grass flavored liquid – it’s because your barista blasted your green tea leaves to shit with piping hot 212° water from the hot water tap. Because there are so so so many kinds of tea, and again, ain’t nobody got time for that, most of the population doesn’t really know if their tea has been brewed at the right temperature. Now if Starbucks brewed a whole batch of nasty green tea at 212° every day and only served that, people would start to notice. So they don’t, and instead throw your tea bag into whatever temperature of hot water they have at the moment, and you’re long gone by the time you take your first sip.
While coffee and different types of teas are steeped at different temperatures, the extraction process is largely the same. Fine oils and small particles come out and break off of the tea leaves or coffee beans that “blend” in the water through a process called [diffusion](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=oPbEX6qwCK2bwbkPrZ2_gA0&q=what+is+diffusion&oq=what+is+diffusion&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAMyCAgAELEDEMkDMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADoECAAQRzoECCkQRjoECAAQQzoFCAAQsQM6CAgAELEDEIMBOgsIABCxAxDJAxCRAjoFCAAQkQJQvmNY8XZgsHhoAHABeACAAWyIAZEIkgEEMTUuMZgBAKABAcgBCMABAQ&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp) to make your desired beverage.
TLDR; tea is fancier than coffee and nobody really brews it right. both tea and coffee can be brewed using the same exact method, but we don’t usually do it that way because it tastes better the way we already do it.
I make coffee by steeping the grounds dispersed in hot water for a couple of minutes, then filtering the result with a mesh filter. That’s almost exactly how you make tea in a pot, the only difference is the coffee filter is on a plunger in the pot and tea is traditionally filtered by pouring through a strainer into a cup.
The reason they don’t make coffee bags like tea bags is that coffee grounds pack more densely than tea leaves, so they really need to be dispersed through the water when steeping and filtered at the end, whereas tea leaves can infuse well enough contained in a paper bag.
I make a French press every morning which requires steeping coffee grounds for several minutes.
Latest Answers