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
92–100 °C
Typically 96 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
6.3–10 g
Typically 7.5 g
Ratio
2.5–4 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 160sOne minute, brewed hot into a vessel and poured immediately over a glass already full of ice. The chill has to be fast — the aroma is what is being saved.
Equipment
- Glass teapot
Vessel: Ice in the serving glass before brewing starts, filled to about half. Brewing normally and refrigerating afterwards gives a duller, hazier drink from the same leaf, and with this material the difference is not subtle.
Note: Hot water and a short steep, which is the opposite of what the iced greens want and follows from the same principle. A single-bush oolong's aromatics need heat to come out at all and are lost to the air within minutes of doing so; brewing hot and chilling in seconds catches them in the glass. The doubled leaf load compensates for the melting ice and nothing else. Each of these cultivars is bought for a specific aroma and this preparation is the one that shows it most plainly.
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: Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Western brewing (teapot or mug) · Chaozhou gongfu brewing (three cups)
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.