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
88–95 °C
Typically 92 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
3–5 g
Typically 3.8 g
Ratio
1.2–2 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 1150sTwo and a half minutes, then lift the basket out. Leaving it in is the single commonest reason a Chinese black tea is reported as harsh.
- Infusion 2210sWorth taking, which is unusual for a mug basket. These teas hold up to a second pass in a way a broken-grade blend does not.
Equipment
- Mug infuser basket
- Travel infuser bottle
- Empty filter bag
- Tea ball infuser
- Tea dosing spoon
Vessel: A basket wide enough for the leaf to open. A narrow cylindrical infuser holds twisted leaf packed against itself, which under-extracts the middle of the charge and over-extracts the outside at the same time.
Note: Cooler and shorter than the same mug would give an Assam or a breakfast blend, and that is the whole of the set. Chinese gongfu blacks are whole-leaf, lightly rolled and made from smaller-leaf bushes; at boiling point for four minutes they turn drying and lose the cocoa and stone-fruit register they are bought for. The gap between this and the western-pot numbers is small on paper and consequential in a mug, because there is no dilution to hide behind.
What this does not tell you
These parameters are a synthesis of common practice rather than recorded practice for this specific tea.
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) · Gongfu brewing (gaiwan)
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.