Say I’ve brewed a nice hot pot of tea. Then say I decide I’d like to turn that tea back into plain water.
Is that possible, using equipment you might find in a typical home? Will a really good filter work, or is a chemical process necessary? What does it take?
You could pretty easily build a simple distillation system out of things available in the average household. You would need something to boil the tea in (a teapot would work perfectly, as the steam comes out a small spout), some type of hose to carry the steam, and then a second pot to capture the steam in and condense it back to water. Packing the second pot and the hose in ice would probably work to assist condensation.
Your teapot might be ruined afterwards, with tea residue baked on the inside.
Put the tea back in the kettle, and bring it to a boil. Fill a saucepan with ice cubes sprinkled liberally with salt. Direct the steam from your tea kettle onto the bottom of the cold saucepan, angling it so the condensation will run down and drip off into a teacup positioned below. You will lose some of the water as steam that does not condense, but the rest will be pure, distilled water. The tea residue will remain in the kettle, making a nice mess to clean up.
All those methods will extract the water but you haven’t “umbrewed” tea. I don’t think tea made with the residue in the pot will taste the same as it did before.
A Britta filter (or one of the carbon/resin filters in modern refrigerators) might do the job. Not sure if it will get everything on the first pass, though.
Or osmosis: if your house includes a semi-permeable membrane, make a bag of it and put the tea inside, and seal. Then place the bag under a brick or equivalent, and see the water seep out through the membrane, leaving the tea in the bag.
I would just toss the tea bag, the hot tea, and forget the whole thing.
Salvaging the tea bag or the water wouldn’t be worth my time and trouble!
To be brutably frank this reply is probably a wase of my time. :rolleyes:
Except that is not how the OP defined ‘unbrewed’:
Says nothing about rebrewing the unbrewed tea residue back into twice brewed tea; he who pays the piper, calls the tune.