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Comment by StrangeATractor | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about.

As for boiling tea for sanitation, I took a wilderness first responder class and they taught us that you could bring water to a boil at any altitude a human can breath at (without holding it at a boil for 15 minutes as some claim) and it's considered sterilized. In Cusco, that would be around 191F/89C (humans can breathe quite a bit higher up than Cusco). Not a bad tea-brewing temp!

Also, I suggest trying kukicha. It's high in l-theanine and lower in caffeine. Tasty too.

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> Yeah it seems so dried out you wouldn't have too much to worry about.

How about the people touching / sneezing on it in the packaging factory?

If you source your green tea from a Japanese tea farm, this is really not a concern. Farm workers all wear gloves and masks, and the tea leaves are harvested directly from the tea bushes to a net via a machine.

Additionally, the tea plants are covered by cloth for up to a month before harvest, dramatically reducing the chances of bird droppings.

They are also steamed, rolled, and dried by mechanical devices which remove virtually all moisture.

Just a shout out to ikkyu tea, if you buy in bulk and get free shipping, it's a pretty good value for tea that you can trust.

Not sure about most things transferred via touch/sneeze but I imagine lack of moisture would cause anything living to die fairly quickly.

Except aflatoxin.

I think it's a halflife/timing thing. Once it hits boiling, it's instance death for most microbials.

You can keep it a lot lower for longer but it's also potentially difficult to tell the temperature (easier to say, bubbles? It's hot enough)

Not really. Most microbes will be dead in a minute at about 70C. Milk pasteurization is done at 60C, after all. Most importantly, it'll kill salmonella.

Some hardy bugs and/or spores can survive regular boiling anyway, so you're not aiming for total sterilization.

It would be a really cool coincidence if the temperature at which water boils happened to be the magic number that killed most bacteria (unless it killed them because it boiled water they depend on to function or something), but I don't think that's the case - I think that boiling is something that's easy for humans to do and to perceive that also happens to be above the safe threshold and kill enough of the bacteria that harm us to make it a useful break point, even if the actual 212* isn't especially relevant.

Many bacteria have mechanisms for surviving dry periods, ex: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00294-019-01036-z

Unfortunately the bacteria that can survive drying-out are also the ones that survive boiling, so unless you're going to boil your tea in a pressure cooker it's not much help.

We'd be drinking gamma ray sanitized tea if that had really been a problem. Honestly it sounds like mercury scare in seafood and pourover rice cooking for arsenic reduction, just not-invented-here behavior.

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