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
3.8–7.5 g
Typically 5 g
Ratio
1.5–3 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 11800sHalf an hour at a hard boil, and this is a decoction rather than a steep. Households run it far longer and top it up through the day.
Equipment
- Butter tea churn (chandong)
- Brewing saucepan
- Tea strainer
Vessel: An open pan for the boil and a tall narrow churn for what follows. The churning is the method: butter stirred into hot tea floats, and butter churned into it stays suspended, which is the difference between butter tea and tea with butter in it.
Note: Tea extraction only. Butter, traditionally from yak or dri milk, and salt go in at the churn, and their quantities live in the drink record. Practice varies widely across the plateau and between households, and there is no authoritative version — these figures describe the concentrate the churn needs, not one family’s recipe.
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) · Boiling aged and dark tea (zhu cha)
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.