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
2–3.8 g
Typically 3 g
Ratio
0.8–1.5 g /100 ml
Rinse traditional, optional
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 1300sA simmer, not a steep. Five minutes from the moment the leaf goes into boiling water.
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 and a strainer. This is also what the exhausted leaf of a gongfu session is for: whatever is left in the pot goes in and is boiled, and the amount is whatever was used.
Note: Loose aged leaf and nuggets are wetted more readily than a brick and need less time, though nuggets sit at the long end of this because they are compressed by accident rather than by press. Boiling past the point where the liquor thickens turns it thin and papery, which is the one way to overdo a method that is otherwise hard to spoil.
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: Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Boiling and decoction · Gongfu brewing (Yixing pot) · 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.