Brew assistant

Infusion schedule

A session of 10–15 infusions is typical. The schedule below is authored to 8; beyond that, extend each steep noticeably rather than repeating the last time.

1. Infusion 112sAfter a rinse, and after a second rinse if the material was compressed.
2. Infusion 210s
3. Infusion 312s
4. Infusion 418s
5. Infusion 528s
6. Infusion 645s
7. Infusion 775s
8. Infusion 8120sKeep going. Dark tea outlasts every other category, and the late steeps are where the sweetness sits.

Equipment

• Yixing teapot
• Fairness pitcher (cha hai)
• Tea tray (cha pan)
• Unglazed clay teapot (non-Yixing)
• Tea scale
• Tea boat
• Tasting cup
• Tea cloth
• Tetsubin (unlined iron kettle)
• Cha he (tea presentation vessel)
• Waste water bowl (jianshui)
• Cup stand (chatuo)
• Tea pet
• Cha dao utensil set
• Tea tongs
• Brewing timer
• Charcoal brazier (fenglu)
• Nixing pottery teapot — Nixing is the other unglazed Chinese pot used the same way as Yixing: burnished rather than glazed, so it stays porous.
• Sha diao (clay water kettle) — The Chaozhou clay kettle is the traditional water vessel for small-pot brewing — thin-walled so a small volume boils fast and is boiled again between rounds.
• Tea mat (chaxi cloth) — The dry-table alternative to a draining tray: a cloth defines the surface and the waste goes into a bowl instead of through the table.
• Electric ceramic tea stove — The common tea-table heat source in China, because a radiant plate heats clay, glass and unlined iron that induction cannot.
• Travel gongfu set — The packed version of the same practice, at the cost of vessel size — smaller pots shorten every infusion.

Vessel: A thick-walled unglazed pot kept for dark tea and nothing else. The absorption argument runs hardest here: shou pu-erh and Hunan dark tea leave the strongest residue of anything in the catalogue, and a pot that has held them will put that into a green tea for years afterwards.

Note: Clay is conventionally preferred to porcelain for dark tea on two grounds, and only one of them is well founded. Heat retention is real and matters, because dense fermented leaf gives its body up slowly and a falling temperature stalls it. The claim that clay removes the damp, storage-derived note of a poorly kept shou is widely repeated and not established — a proper rinse does more, and a tea that still tastes of the warehouse after two rinses was not going to be fixed by a pot.

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: Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Western brewing (teapot or mug) · Boiling aged and dark tea (zhu cha)