Brew assistant

Infusion schedule

This is a multi-infusion style. The schedule below is authored to 1 infusions; beyond that, extend each steep noticeably rather than repeating the last time.

1. Infusion 1360sSix minutes, and longer is no disaster. This is the most forgiving grandpa material in the catalogue.

Equipment

• Travel infuser bottle
• Vacuum flask
• Chinese lidded mug — The lid holds heat through a long slow drink and, tilted, holds the leaf back while you sip — which is why the inner basket is optional.
• Double-walled glass — An air gap keeps the outer skin holdable while leaf sits in near-boiling water all morning.
• Hot water boiler — Topping up all day needs hot water available all day, which is what the insulated boiler is for.

Vessel: A tall glass or a flask. Late-picked white tea is bulky and floats obstinately, so a wide mouth is easier to drink around than a narrow one.

Note: Much hotter than any green-tea glass here. Coarse late-picked white leaf has little of the fraction that turns harsh with heat and a great deal of stalk and mature leaf that needs heat to give anything at all, so the usual worry about an unremovable leaf load barely applies. The bud grades are not brewed this way and are not given the set — they are too expensive to leave sitting in a glass and too fine to drink around.

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) · Boiling and decoction · Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Cold brew tea