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
0–5 °C
Typically 2 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
10–17.5 g
Typically 12.5 g
Ratio
4–7 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 11800sHalf an hour or so, and the shortest ice steep in the catalogue. Watch the melt rather than the clock.
Equipment
- Shiboridashi
- Glass teapot
- Houhin
Vessel: A lidded dish, with the ice heaped on the dry material. A shallow vessel is better than a deep one, because a deep heap of ice melts from the top and leaves the bottom of the bed dry.
Note: Stems from shaded tea carry a great deal of sweetness and almost none of the astringency leaf does, and they release it faster than leaf because there is no folded lamina to soak through. The result is a few sips of something very sweet with essentially no grip behind it, which is what ice brewing is for. It goes wrong in one direction only: leaving it until the melt water is warm, at which point it becomes an indifferent cold brew.
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) · Kyusu brewing (Japanese style) · Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Low-temperature brewing (gyokuro style) · Cold brew tea
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.