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
3–8 °C
Typically 5 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
3–5 g
Typically 3.8 g
Ratio
1.2–2 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 121600sSix hours. Bud material has no coarse leaf to hold anything back and gives most of what it has early, in cold water as in hot.
Equipment
- Glass teapot
- Cold brew bottle
- Plastic teaware — Most cold-brew bottles and travel brewers are heat-tolerant plastic: light and unbreakable, and a surface that takes up aroma from smoky, roasted and heavily scented teas.
Vessel: A bottle and a fine strainer, or a second pour-through. Downy buds shed a great deal of fine hair, which is harmless and looks like a fault.
Note: The lightest leaf load of any cold brew here, and deliberately so: a downy bud black tea cold-brewed at the usual black-tea ratio is syrupy and one-dimensional. This is the material cold brewing suits best in the whole black category, because the tannic fraction that makes a cold-steeped Assam dull is largely absent and what is left is malt sugar and cocoa. It is also the clearest demonstration that a cold set cannot be derived from a hot one — the ratio moves down while the time moves up by a factor of a hundred.
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) · Gongfu brewing (gaiwan)
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.