Brewing Guide

Introduction

Several factors affect the taste of the end result when brewing tea. These factors include:

  • Dry leaf to water ratio
  • Water temperature
  • Brewing vessel
  • Pouring technique
  • Steeping duration
  • How many times it’s already been steeped

Generally more leaf and less water will result in a stronger, more nuanced and concentrated brew, higher water temperature will cause the tea to infuse quicker, as will pouring directly onto the leaves, or pouring in a way that agitates them, the mineral content of your water, and the material and heat retention of your brewing vessel can also have effects on the end result of your tea. Finding the right balance between these is the key to making good tea. We’ll offer some guidelines to start in the description of each tea on this site, but please don’t worry too much about exact measurements, keep experimenting and develop your intuition to find out what works best for you.

There are a lot of ways to make tea, what follows is a breakdown of my ownpersonal understanding of a few different methods. The names of the methods are not universal, and are just western monikers. If you have any questions or criticisms feel free to contact us.

“Grandpa” Style

The simplest way to make tea, and the default for most people in China

1. Take some leaves (1-3g), put them into a glass or mug (a tall glass is ideal so you can watch the leaves unfurl).

2. Pour in hot water. of a temperature appropriate to your tea, till the cup is 3/4 full. Let the tea cool and take a sip, if your tea is too weak, leave it a little longer, if it’s too strong, add more water.

3. You can refill your cup when it’s about 1/4 full if you’re not done drinking yet.

Notes:

  • You might choose to heat the cup first, add the leaves after the water, or add half the water, followed by the leaves and the rest of the water, these will all affect the taste.
  • You can brew any tea in this style, but it tends to favour green, white, and yellow teas as well as unoxidized oolongs more than others. You can certainly grandpa-brew other tea types, but due to the nature of their processing they tend to extract more quickly, meaning your tea is going to get bitter and stronger quicker, so if you do want to grandpa-brew them I’d recommend using less leaves and not leaving them too long.
  • If you want to brew for multiple people in this style, simply scale up the leaf and water quantity, and brew in a jug or pitcher/gong dao bei, so you can pour into individual cups when it’s ready.
  • If your leaves are floating you can prod them down, blow them out of the way, or use your teeth as a strainer to stop them from going into your mouth.
  • If you’re brewing a small or broken-leaf tea, such as a Japanese sencha, or typical Indian tea you can use a metal infusing basket, but I’d recommend brewing them in a teapot with a strainer (built in or external) instead as an infusing basket generally doesn’t give enough room for leaves to fully expand.

“Bowl” Style

Bowl style is pretty similar to grandpa style, but less casual, with more of a focus on meditation and analysis.

1. Pour hot water into your bowl to heat it up, then discard the water and add a small amount of leaf to the bowl (1-4 grams).

2. Fill up with hot water of a temperature appropriate to the tea you’re brewing.

3. Leave the tea to steep for at least a minute. Drink directly from the bowl slowly as it infuses, focusing on the aroma, taste, mouth-feel, aftertaste, and body sensation with each sip.

4. If you want to drink a second infusion simply add more water once the bowl is almost empty and wait.

Notes:

  • Some people will use a bigger bowl and a spoon.
  • The focus is on observing, tasting, and smelling the tea as it slowly infuses and judging the different aspects of it, it’s recommended to focus your sole attention onto the tea.
  • This can be quite a meditative practice and it’s nice to take your time and only reinfuse once or twice.

“Gongfucha” Style

Cha means tea, and gongfu is the same Chinese word as kungfu, just romanized differently, it means something like: “to do something skilfully”.

To start with all you need is some tea, a gaiwan or teapot, cup(s), something to catch any spills like a tea towel or cha pan (tea tray), and if brewing for multiple people I’d recommend a pitcher to make sure everyone’s tea is the same strength.

1. Heat up your teaware by pouring in hot water and passing it from one vessel to another, once everything is warm discard the water (you can pour it away or right back into the kettle). Then add a large amount of leaves (around 1g per 20ml) to the heated teapot or gaiwan.

2. Fill the gaiwan or teapot with hot water.

3. Allow the tea to infuse for a while (5-30 seconds) and then pour out to your cup or pitcher.

4. Infuse repeatedly until you’ve had enough tea, or the tea is spent. If the tea is too strong for you, try shortening your brewing time, using cooler water, not pouring directly onto the leaves, or as a last resort removing some leaves. If your tea isn’t strong enough, do the opposite.

Notes:

  • Gongfucha is often referred to as a ceremony, and while there are formal Chinese tea ceremonies, in this example it is not. It’s kind of a modern, western-influenced evolution of the Chaozhou (a city in Guangdong, southern China) brewing style. Chaozhou brewing involves using a pretty small teapot or gaiwan, 3 small cups and a very high leaf to water ratio, e.g. 1g per 10ml. You then steep for a few seconds and pour out into the cups, resulting in a very strong flavourful brew.
  • Gongfu cha has evolved from it’s Chaozhou routes and taken on a few new tools, like the gong dao bei/cha hai (a pitcher) originating in Taiwan, and eased up a little on the guidelines. However the core principals of high leaf to water ratio, and short steeping times remain the same.
  • You can brew any tea gongfucha style, but you’ll want to use cooler water for green and yellow teas. It’s a great way to experiment , learn and improve your tea brewing skills. It can be as simple as a gaiwan, a cup, and a tea towel, or feature an elaborate setup of a tray with drainage, decorations, an unglazed clay teapot, a pitcher, smelling cups, utensils, etc, that’s up to you.
  • Some people like to rinse their tea by doing a very short initial steep, then throwing it away. This is to help get rid of any contaminants on the tea, or help give it a head start in hydrating and opening up. I don’t think it’s really necessary with most teas, and just do a longer first steeping for compressed or balled tea, but would recommend it for hei cha and aged tea because they’re often very old, and can be quite dusty.
  • Keep in mind that most teas will have a bell curve of strength, not reaching their full potential until the 3rd or 4th infusion, and appreciating the change in flavour over multiple infusions is part of the fun. Some tea, (specific oolongs or hei cha) can be infused more than 10 times.

“Japanese” Style

Japanese tea is primarily green, and is processed quite differently to tea from elsewhere, it has a reputation for being very fussy with it’s brewing parameters.

1. Heat up a teapot (ideally a Japanese style kyusu), or shiboridashi (the Japanese version of a gaiwan, but with a fixed lid, a lip and straining grooves) with hot water, once it’s hot, discard the water and add some leaves to the teapot and smell the aroma (at least 2g per 100ml, less than you’d use for other green teas).

2. Add hot water of a temperature appropriate to your tea and allow to steep with the lid off for 45 to 70 seconds.

3. Put the lid on, pour out, and drink.

4. Add hot water again, infuse with the lid off for 5-20 seconds, pour out and drink. From the 3rd infusion onwards start at 50 seconds and increase the duration exponentially with each steep until you’ve had enough or the tea is too weak.

Notes

  • The “kill-green” step of tea processing is done almost always via steaming in Japan whereas in other countries it’s usually roasted or baked. This difference, in combination with vastly different cultivars, terroir and growing methods are main reasons Japanese tea tastes so unique.
  • You can brew using a gaiwan, infusing basket, or western style teapot, but because Japanese green tea leaves are often broken and very small you should pour through a strainer/filter to avoid getting too many leaves in your cup. Kyusu and shiboridashi have fine straining mechanisms designed for japanese green tea and don’t let many leaves through.
  • As a general rule gyokuro likes temperatures from 50-60°C, and very high quality sencha or kabusecha should be brewed at lower temperatures around 70°C, while fukamushi (deep steamed) or broken leaf sencha should be brewed at 70-75°C. Roasted Japanese teas or Houjicha can take much hotter water, even boiling without much ill effect.
  • Leave the lid off between and during infusions, this prevents the brewing vessel from getting too hot, and essentially steaming the leaves.
  • Most Japanese green teas are good for 3-5 infusions.
  • If the tea is too strong or too weak, try and reduce/increase the steeping duration for subsequent infusions, or use cooler/hotter water.

“Matcha” Style

Matcha/mǒchá/malcha in Japanese, Chinese Pinyin, and Korean respectively is, usually green, powdered tea. Powdered teas have been drunk since the 7th century and were the default way of drinking tea in the Chinese Song dynasty (960-1279). Chan Buddhists in China made a ritual out of this beverage, this was brought over to Japan in 1191 and while powdered tea isn’t very common in China anymore it’s still widely produced and drunk in Japan and has become a famous national export internationally.

1. Depending on if you want a thick or thin matcha take 1.5g-4g or 2-4 chashaku (a traditional bamboo scoop measuring approximately half a teaspoon) scoops and drop them into a small wide, pre-heated drinking bowl.

2. Add about 10ml of 70°C-80°C water to the bowl.

3. Use a whisk (ideally a traditional bamboo chasen) to gently mix the water and the powder into a thick paste, removing any lumps.

4. Add an additional 60ml of 70°C-80°C water to the bowl.

5. Whisk the matcha vigorously in an M or W motion, try not to touch the bottom of the bowl, after an even layer of froth has appeared slowly remove the whisk in a spiral motion. Wait to cool a little, and drink.

Japanese matcha production steps 

  1. Mature tea bushes are shade grown for up to 20 days before harvest, they do this by covering the tea bushes with a canopy of straw, or fabric. This slows down the growth of the leaves, and causes them to increase production of chlorophyll and amino acids (the most notable one being theanine the chemical in tea that aids relaxation).
  2. The leaves are then harvested, transported to a factory, washed, then steamed to prevent oxidation, finally they’re cooled, and dried. 
  3. Next they’re sorted, cut into smaller pieces, deveined, and destalked painstakingly by hand or less precisely by a machine. This leaves the producer with tencha which is then sampled and blended to create desirable flavours and stored in a cool environment until it’s time to make the matcha.
  4. Traditionally matcha is ground by hand on a stone mill, but nowadays it’s mostly machine powered stone mills, this is an arduous process no matter what, as low levels of friction are necessary, just 40 grams of matcha can take over an hour to be ground down. Other more time efficient machines are used but enthusiasts consider them to produce inferior quality matcha.

Hopefully by understanding this process you can understand why good matcha is as expensive as it is.

Notes

  • “Ceremonial Grade” matcha is not a real thing in Japan, and is merely a western marketing gimmick that has no regulated meaning (you can call anything ceremonial grade without getting in any legal trouble). In Japan matcha is graded and assigned purposes based on its flavour, growing and storage conditions, processing methods, age, cultivar, and colour. To judge the true quality of commercial matcha you should look at information on it’s production, its colour, and its taste. If no information besides a generic description is provided, it’s probably not great matcha.
  • Sieving your matcha into the bowl helps reduce clumps, however if you stir thoroughly with your chasen in step 3 then you shouldn’t need to use a sieve.
  • While you can’t beat the effectiveness of a chasen, you can use an electric milk frother, or a mini whisk instead. As a last resort just shake the matcha vigorously in a jar.
  • If you don’t want to bother getting your water to the right temperature, an easier way to do it is to add 10ml of cold water in step 2, and then add boiling water in step 4. You’ll end up with water in the right temperature range.
  • Since you’re drinking the leaf itself, rather than just an infusion of it, powdered teas have the highest concentration of caffeine and theanine out of all types of tea.
  • You can use larger amounts of water and powder, but to get the most out of it I’d recommend sticking to small servings and just making more if you’ve not had enough.
  • If the taste is too bitter for you try using less powder, adding more water, or using cooler water next time, if too weak or watery then do the opposite.
  • Matcha is commonly used as an ingredient in food, or other drinks, but the matcha used in this process is generally very cheaply produced and not very nice to drink on it’s own.