The goal of this guide is not to give you a recipe, but to help you understand the principles behind brewing tea. By understanding these fundamentals, you can adjust your brewing parameters to suit your own taste and get the best from any tea.
While this guide focuses on leaf-to-water ratio, water temperature, and brewing time, other factors also influence the final result, including the teaware used, how water comes into contact with the leaves, water quality, leaf characteristics, ambient temperature, and even the serving temperature. All of these variables can affect the overall drinking experience.
Leaf-To-Water Ratio
Think of it like making a soup.
Using more ingredients creates greater richness, depth, and complexity. In the same way, using more tea leaves can produce a fuller body, more intense flavour, greater complexity, and a richer mouthfeel.
However, adding too many ingredients does not necessarily make a better soup.
Tea is no different. Using too much leaf can push the tea out of balance, making it taste harsh, bitter, or overly astringent.
Using too little leaf can have the opposite effect.
Just as a soup made with too few ingredients can become bland or insipid, a tea brewed with too little leaf may fail to fully express its character and potential.
Water Temperature
Different compounds are extracted from tea leaves at different rates.
As water temperature increases, extraction becomes faster, meaning a greater proportion of compounds enter the liquor over the same period of time.
In general:
Lower temperatures often favour a balance that highlights sweetness, smoothness, and delicate aromas, while higher temperatures increase the extraction of caffeine, catechins, and other polyphenols, adding structure and depth but also increasing the likelihood of bitterness and astringency. Too little extraction of these compounds, however, may result in a liquor that feels soft, lacking in structure, depth, and persistence.
Brewing Time
When water first comes into contact with the leaves, some compounds dissolve very quickly, while others take longer to extract. The longer the infusion, the more total compouns is extracted.
Imagine brewing a tea at the recommended temperature. After one minute, the liquor may taste fresh, sweet, and aromatic. After three minutes, it may develop greater body and depth. After six minutes, however, bitterness and astringency may begin to dominate the flavour.
The key is to stop the infusion at the point where the tea best expresses its character.
Conclusion
Every tea is different. Some teas benefit from a higher leaf-to-water ratio, lower water temperatures and longer infusion times, while others reveal their best qualities with higher temperatures and shorter brews.
Recommended Starting Points for Different Tea Types
Each tea we offer includes its own recommended starting brewing parameters on both the product page and the package label.
The table below, however, provides general starting parameters based on Gongfu-style brewing for different tea categories. These recommendations are intended as a guide rather than fixed recipes and can be adjusted to suit your personal taste and the characteristics of each tea.
| Tea | Tea Leaves (g) | Temp. (°C) | 1st Infusion Time (s) | Repeat (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | 4-7 | 90 | 80-150 | + 20-60 |
| Green | 3.5-4 | 70-75 | 120-300 | + 40-90 |
| Oolong | 5-9 | 85-90 | 30-90 | + 10-60 |
| Black | 3.5-5 | 90-95 | 180 | +60 |
| Pu-Erh | 10 | 100 | 60 | +20 |
Note: “Repeat” means adding the specified number of seconds to each subsequent infusion.
