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 frequently boiled in milk from the start rather than in water with milk added. The milk-first version needs the longer end — fat and protein compete for the compounds coming off the leaf, so the same extraction takes measurably longer.
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. A milk-only boil catches far more readily than a water-first one, and there is no recovering a pan that has caught.
Note: A synthesis of household practice rather than a national recipe, and the variation is wide in two directions that matter: milk tea boiled without any spice at all is at least as common as spiced, and the proportion of milk to water runs from a splash to the whole liquid. Recorded for these origins because their own records describe a substantial domestic black-tea habit taken with milk and sugar, running separately from anything the export trade sees — and because CTC granules are engineered for exactly this treatment, which is most of why so much of this material 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.
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: 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.