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
95–100 °C
Typically 98 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
2–3.8 g
Typically 2.8 g
Ratio
0.8–1.5 g /100 ml
No rinse
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 1600sTen minutes at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil. Held too hard the sourness sharpens rather than rounding.
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 pan. In its home region the tea is simmered rather than steeped and often kept warm and topped up, which is a service habit rather than a second extraction.
Note: The rare Japanese post-fermented teas are boiled rather than steeped, and the reason is the same one that applies to Chinese dark tea: the leaf has been worked by microbes into a dense, slowly soluble material. The liquor is thin, tart and pale rather than thick and dark, which is a genuine difference from Chinese dark tea and not an under-extraction — the acidity comes from the lactic fermentation the leaf underwent and no amount of boiling turns it into pu-erh. No rinse, because the sourness is the point.
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 · Western brewing (teapot or mug)
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.