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
12.5–20 g
Typically 15 g
Ratio
5–8 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 12400sForty minutes or so, which is how long a generous handful of ice takes to give up enough water to be worth drinking. The clock is measuring the ice, not the tea.
Equipment
- Shiboridashi
- Glass teapot
- Houhin
Vessel: A shallow lidded dish or a shiboridashi, with the leaf spread flat and the ice piled directly on top of it. No water is added at any point.
Note: A very high leaf load producing a very small liquor, and both are the method working correctly rather than a mistake. Melting ice holds the water at the bottom of the liquid range, where the sweet and savoury fraction still dissolves and the bitter one barely moves, and because the only water present is what has melted, what does dissolve stays concentrated. Expect a few sips. The spent leaf then brews conventionally and still has most of its hot extraction left.
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: Cold brew tea · Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) · Kyusu brewing (Japanese style)
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.