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
96–100 °C
Typically 99 °C
Leaf for 250 ml
2.5–3.8 g
Typically 3 g
Ratio
1–1.5 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, agitated once at the start and once near the end. Lift the bag out rather than squeezing it: squeezing forces out the concentrated liquid held in the leaf bed, which is the most astringent fraction of the whole steep.
Equipment
- Empty filter bag
- Pyramid teabag
- Hot water boiler — The office and household case for a held-hot boiler is exactly this one — a bag, a mug and no waiting.
Vessel: A standard mug, with room for the bag to move. A bag pinned under the surface with a spoon extracts only where water is circulating past it, which is a smaller part of the bag than it looks.
Note: Shorter and lower-leafed than this record's loose set, because cut granules present far more surface for their weight than the same tea loose — not because a bag is a lesser tea. This is the honest ordinary case for an auction-lot CTC: the leaf is bought for colour and strength, blended with material from three other countries, and met by a drinker as an anonymous bag. Judged as a single origin it is unremarkable; judged as the thing that has to carry a blend through milk in two minutes, it is engineered for the job.
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: Mug infuser brewing
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.