Oolong Tea – Anti-Inflammatory Benefits

Oolong tea made by cold brew is a great year round drink that anyone can make without any fancy equipment. You don’t even need ice, but you can add for an iced tea. It has a mild taste like jasmine tea that’s also served with fortune cookies in restaurants.🥠

And especially if you’re not a green tea taste fan, but like the idea of its healthy benefits, you can make a cold brew tea with oolong that’s more mild tasting.

And the lower preparing temperatures for green and oolong help to prevent burning the tea leaves that would yield a bitter taste. With cold brew tea, there’s no worries!

And that’s why green works well for cold brew tea as it brews at cooler temps.

Since oolong has a milder tea taste (than green), you can make it a flavorful tea by adding in florals, fruity flavors, or even cold brew coffee (that’s also easy to make!) to mask any undesired tea tastes and reap the healthy benefits.

…I first learned about brewing cooler tea temps when I was doing research and interviewing tea experts and sommeliers on the perfect green tea brewing temperature, writing for healthy lifestyle publications.

And that’s when I heard about oolong tea, that’s not as common in the western world. It’s imported mostly from mountainous areas in Asia.

And oolong comes from the same tea plant that green and black tea come from.

The difference is in the oxidation process.

If you think of oxidation on a spectrum, green (tea) is stopped from oxidizing fastest and black is left longest.

Then, the color says it all…

Oolong tea is in between as a greenish tinged-brown, and tastes more like a green than a black tea. Both have some amount of caffeine, but not as much as caffeinated coffee.

And if you’re not a green tea taste fan, oolong is a great way to get in the green healthy benefits and L-theanine that helps with focus, and relaxation. You get a smooth ride in productivity!

This is great if you’re working on a task or project that requires your attention and/or you’re feeling anxious about.

And if your day is 8-hours, then that can really help you through the up and down workday mood swings.

…Hooray, ooh-long!

Oolong tea also has antioxidant catechins (ECGC), that’s also found in green and black teas. 

…Remember they’re related coming from the same Camellia sinensis plant.

And after attending a tea symposium, I learned that drinking many tea cups daily is healthy.

It’s an anti-inflammatory tea good for protecting against inflammation in the body, around the bones and from your mouth down to your toes. And that helps prevent some lifestyle chronic diseases, especially lifestyle-choice-related ones.

Tea is also a drink you can sip all day even if you’re fasting from food. It won’t break your fast if drank plain where nothing is added (like milk or sugar).

And if you make ti cold brew, it’s already room temperature cold, so you don’t have to keep warming it back up. 🍵 You can focus on your task at hand.

Those are some oolong all day points to get excited about!

To make the cold brew tea way: take a simple brewing tea bag and add to water in a drinking glass. In a few minutes you can see the amber tea color filtering in. And in just a few hours you have a deep amber tea color with no brewing effort. No sun. No equipment. Just water, glass, and a tea bag. 😊 Enjoy!