Brew assistant
Pick a tea and a brewing style. Everything below is transcribed from that tea's own authored parameters — nothing is scaled from another style, because a ratio and a steep time do not transfer between styles.
Water temperature
98–100 °C
Typically 100 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
2.5–5 g
Typically 3.8 g
Ratio
1–2 g /100 ml
Rinse recommended
Infusion schedule
This style is authored as a single infusion. A second steep from the same leaf will be thinner rather than merely weaker.
- Infusion 1480sA simmer, not a steep. Add the broken brick to water already boiling — the long climb from cold drags a dull edge out of dense leaf.
Equipment
- Kettle
- Brewing saucepan
- Tea strainer
- Tetsubin (unlined iron kettle)
- Teapot warmer
- Boiling teapot — The vessel for boiling rather than steeping: heat-resistant, wide-based, and made to sit on a heat source with the leaf in it.
- Electric ceramic tea stove — A radiant plate takes the glass and clay vessels that boiling calls for.
- Induction plate — Works only with ferromagnetic material, so an unlined iron kettle is fine and the glass boiling pot beside it is not.
Vessel: A kettle or open pan that can hold a simmer, with a strainer at the pour. The kettle is also the practical argument for the method: it serves a table, which a gaiwan does not.
Note: Eight minutes suits a brick broken into flakes; a piece left in lumps wants longer, and the tell is body rather than colour, which arrives long before the tea does. Boiled dark tea gives thickness and almost no top-note aroma — that left the leaf several infusions ago and no amount of heat brings it back.
What this does not tell you
These parameters are a synthesis of common practice rather than recorded practice for this specific tea.
How many infusions this tea will give beyond the schedule below is not recorded.
No caffeine estimate is authored for this tea, so the assistant cannot tell you how strong the cup will be in that sense.
Leaf weight is a weight. A teaspoon is not — a fluffy white tea and a tightly rolled oolong differ several-fold by volume, so scales beat spoons here.
Other authored styles for this tea: Boiling and decoction · Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Western brewing (teapot or mug) · Gongfu brewing (Yixing pot)
Methods TeaHQ describes but cannot give numbers for
1 of 28 brewing methods have no authored parameters on any tea. They are listed rather than hidden: the method exists and is described, the numbers are simply not written yet. Nothing here is estimated from a neighbouring style.
- Herbal infusion (tisane)
Herbal infusion is on that list for a second reason as well: the herbal catalogue is two records held in review, so there is nothing to brew even once parameters exist.