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 5.5 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 1360sSix minutes, and often the whole thing is boiled in milk from the start rather than in water. That version needs the longer end of the range.
Equipment
- Tea strainer
- Tea sock (cloth filter bag)
- Brewing saucepan
- Mortar and pestle
- Kulhar (unglazed clay cup) — The unglazed clay cup the drink is served in at stalls and on platforms, used once and discarded.
Vessel: A pan wide enough to watch, since a milk-only boil catches far more readily than a water-first one.
Note: East African household practice varies and this is a synthesis rather than a national recipe: milk tea boiled without spice is at least as common as spiced, and the proportion of milk to water runs from a splash to the whole liquid. The longer time reflects the milk-heavy versions, where extraction is genuinely slower — fat and protein compete for the compounds coming off the leaf. Kenyan and Malawian CTC is engineered for exactly this treatment, which is why so much of it never reaches a teapot.
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.
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: Western brewing (teapot or mug) · Boiling and decoction · Mug infuser brewing · Tea bag brewing
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.