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
90–96 °C
Typically 93 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
2.5–4 g
Typically 3.3 g
Ratio
1–1.6 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 1210sThree and a half minutes, slightly longer than a CTC mug because whole orthodox leaf extracts more slowly than a cut one.
Equipment
- Mug infuser basket
- Travel infuser bottle
- Empty filter bag
- Tea ball infuser
- Tea dosing spoon
Vessel: A deep basket. Orthodox Assam leaf is long and wiry and needs vertical room as much as width.
Note: Cooler than the everyday-black set on the same shelf, and this is the point of the record: golden-tipped orthodox Assam is sold as the antidote to harsh breakfast tea and is then brewed at breakfast-tea temperature, which produces exactly the harshness it was bought to avoid. The tips are the part that scorches. Milk is optional here in a way it is not with CTC.
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)
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.