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.
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: Western brewing (teapot or mug) · Mug infuser 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.