As a tea fan, I try to learn new brewing methods, that is when I stumbled upon the moka pot.
From what I read prior to purchase is that the taste of tea would be more intense than what one is used to.
Off to test that hypothesis and can conclude that is (subjectively) false.
Though I should remark that I don't follow brewing times. Means the tea ball stays in the cup until it is time to drink or annoys me too much while drinking. So brewing times at least are 10min and sometimes even hours.
The only thing that the hypothesis did share is a quick way to make a cup of tea. Will need to experiment with small brewing tweaks to play around with the intensify like cooling the lower pot to make it stronger or pulverizing the plant matter.
@barefootstache Pro tip from an ex-chemist/chromatographer!
If you want stronger tea, trying to concentrate via brew time or temperature won't work great since there's a steady state equilibrium for how much tea can be extracted in a single "wash" during brewing. Technically speaking, moka pot, kettle, etc are all (more or less) equivalent in extraction ability when you factor in temperature, pressure, volume of liquid, and mass of tea, and time (assuming we're comparing all else being equal such as water quality, tea type, etc). Of course, "over extracting" typically only occurs due to excessively high temperatures, or too much tea mass in the extraction chamber. This can lead to overly bitter tea, so it's not always a good thing to just extract more.
The first thing you should do is extract with RO or distilled water! This maximizes the amount of "space" there is in the solvent to hold that delicious tea goodness. However, if you're changing from brewing with particularly hard water, you'll need to reduce your tea mass or you'll over extract and get bitter tea.
Instead of trying to extract more, you're better off extracting the most you can in the first pass (which provides the highest quality flavor), then doing a post-extraction concentration step. But John (you may be asking yourself) boiling the tea to reduce it may impact the flavor and damage the resultant brew, what do we do?!
I'm glad you asked, figment of my socially deprived imagination! Instead of boiling it, place the tea, uncovered in a refrigerator for however long you want until it has concentrated to your liking. The fridge passively dehumidifies the environment, hence the need for plastic wrap or other materials to keep food from drying out. The cold will inhibit bacterial growth, and reduce the amount of solvent in your beverage without negatively impacting taste! If you're worried about "fridge smell" polluting your beverage, you can either cover it with a dialysis membrane to only allow water to evaporate, or you can just put it in a well-cleaned, dedicated mini/micro fridge, as many people do when dry-aging beef. (I'm honestly not sure which one is cheaper...I guess the mini fridge would be in the long run) The lack of light also prevents visible/UV light from impacting the light sensitive compounds in the beverage as well. If you decide to try this, do it in glass; mugs/ceramic will stain as the water level decreases.
Overall, I think this method is worth a shot, and has been particularly good for making stronger milk tea for things like boba. Though, I usually don't feel the need to uber-concentrate my tea, but you do you 😄
@johnabs the process seems tedious enough to offer it has a special drink like a gin or tincture.
A hot distill wouldn't be too bad either as long as one catches all the liquid. And probably would lead one of the two products to create multiple phases, where one could further separate them easily with a syringe.
With a quick search wasn't able to find the dialysis membrane you spoke of, at least for purchase.
This did remind me a bit of creating a kombucha mother. The process is quite similar except one exposes the liquid to external air (not fridge) and hope that the good wild yeast finds it.
Think might try out cold brew based off of distilled water.
