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
1.3–2.5 g
Typically 1.8 g
Ratio
0.5–1 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 1240sThe fruit goes in whole or broken in half, peel and all. Whole, it needs several minutes before the peel softens enough to release anything, and the citrus arrives noticeably later than the tea does.
- Infusion 2420sBy the second pass the peel has opened and the balance inverts — this is where the citrus is usually strongest, and where an over-long boil turns the peel's edge from bright to resinous.
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 pan or kettle large enough for the fruit to sit in without being crushed. This is the format's argument for boiling rather than steeping: a whole dried mandarin does not fit a gaiwan and will not open in one, so the choice is boiling it whole or breaking it up and losing the object.
Note: Two materials extracting on different clocks in the same pan, which is unusual enough to be the main thing worth saying about it. The tea inside is a finished shou and behaves like one; the dried peel is slower to start and then keeps giving, and it carries a bitterness of its own that is part of the product rather than a fault. Leaf weight here is the whole object rather than the tea alone, because separating them is not something a drinker does.
What this does not tell you
These parameters are a synthesis of common practice rather than recorded practice for this specific tea.
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) · 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.