Stacking infusions means that you re-infuse a given tea and then mix it with a prior infusion.
Why do this instead of drinking each infusion separately?
One reason might be that you’re making tea for many people at once, but you don’t have a teapot that’s big enough to serve everyone.
You can serve the first infusion, and then mix it with the second one so that you now have double the amount of tea.
Other times, you don’t have as much time to finish drinking all the possible infusions, so that you decide to save the stacked infusions for a later time.
This is more common in teas that yield a high number of infusions, such as oolong and dark teas. But I’ve done it with many Japanese green teas as well.
For example, I find that gyokuro has a different flavor for each infusion. The umami taste is most abundant in the first one.
If I feel like drinking a bigger quantity of gyokuro that has the same flavor, then I can stack all of the infusions first.
It’s sort of like drinking the average flavor profile of a tea’s infusions.
Of course, you could just make one cold infusion with enough water, or prepare it in a Western manner. But the result isn’t exactly the same.
Another time when I sometimes do this is after I host a tea tasting, because there are often wet leaves that can still be infused further.
I can’t drink them right away, so I may save the stacked infusions for later.
There’s some laziness involved, because I may end up mixing infusions of two different green teas 🙂
What has been your experience with stacking infusions?
April 23, 2019
I do this when taking my tea “to go” and have a larger container to fill.