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Brewing information

Brewing tea is an art. Read on to learn some of the common brewing styles. Already know the basics? We'll be posting some pro tips soon.

Styles Overview

There are many ways of brewing tea, and we'll cover just a few here. Click the linked names to jump to that section:

  • Gongfu style brewing, using a gaiwan (lidded cup) or small teapot, usually with a high ratio of leaves to water
  • Western or English style brewing, using a large teapot/vessel, which uses a low ratio of leaves to water
  • "Grandpa style" brewing, which uses an intermediate ratio of leaves to water
  • Simmering, a style most frequently used for heicha/dark teas, which uses a low ratio of leaves to water

In addition to these, there are many other styles, like samovar brewing, bowl tea, Japanese styles like chado and senchado, Tang style preparation, etc.

Gongfu

The basic principle of gongfu tea brewing is to brew the best cup of tea. It's sometimes referred to as "Chinese tea ceremony", but its steps are more practical than ceremonious: each helps achieve the goal of making good tea. Any tea can be brewed gongfu style, but most common are heicha/dark teas like pu'er and liu bao, and also black tea and oolongs. Less delicate white teas, like shou mei and bai mudan, also do quite well brewed gongfu. 

Features of gongfu tea, in brief:

  • Small brewing vessels, small cups. Usually the vessel used to brew the tea is 300ml or smaller. The cups are small to match. For coffee drinkers, gongfu is a shot of espresso, not a venti drip. For booze drinkers, gongfu is a shot of overproof with no mixer, not a rum and 12oz of coke.
  • High ratio of leaves (by weight) to water (by volume)
  • Short infusion times. Much leaf and little water means if you don't steep and decant the tea quickly, it will taste bitter and unpleasant.
  • Many infusions. As few as three for weaker teas, as many as 20 for durable teas.

The idea is that in a small vessel packed with a lot of leaf, you can brew many short infusions to get many delicious, flavorful and aromatic cups of tea.

Getting started with gongfu: equipment

You may see some pretty complicated setups for gongfu brewing with lots of various equipment. While each piece of equipment serves a function, at its essence, the only thing you need to brew gongfu style is a small brewing vessel with a lid, something to decant that vessel into (a cup, a small pitcher) and tea leaves.

Typically, though a gongfu setup usually has:

  • A kettle and a way to heat it, either an electric kettle or a hotplate and clay or metal kettle
  • A small scale, preferably accurate to .1g
  • Small teapot or gaiwan (lidded cup), usually 300ml or less. For one person, I suggest one that's 80ml-100ml.
  • Small pitcher that can hold the liquid from your teapot/gaiwan
  • Filter for the pitcher, optional but helpful
  • Small teacup(s), 20-50ml, or larger if brewing only for yourself
  • Tea tray or bowl, this is to catch spilled water while brewing. If using a bowl, it's handy to have a second bowl available to pour the spilled water into to keep your station neat.
  • Set of tea tools (usually a pot scraper/pick combo tool, a tea scoop, funnel, and tongs), of these I find the most useful are the scraper/pick and funnel.
  • Bowl or plate for spent tea leaves, optional but handy for emptying spent leaves from the pot
  • Tea leaf presentation vessel, usually these are kind of scoop-shaped with a funneled end, so you can pour the dry leaves into the small pot easily.

Gongfu steps

1. Arrange your tea items to your liking. I am right-handed, so my kettle is on my right, bowl with the teapot in front of me, and pitcher to my left
2. Start your water boiling
3. Measure out your tea leaves using your scale.
4. How much leaf to use? I default to 7g myself. The more you brew a particular tea, the more you'll know how much to use.
5. Preheat your vessel. Pour boiling water into the empty vessel, let sit a few seconds to heat, then decant the water into the pitcher.
- Optionally, pour that warm water from the pitcher into the empty cups to warm them while you brew the first infusion. Pour out any remaining water in the pitcher into your wastewater bowl or tea tray basin.
- If you don't do the optional step above, dispose of the heating water in the wastewater bowl or your tea tray basin.
6. Place your measured leaves into the preheated vessel. Use the funnel if you have one and if it's helpful. I like to smell the tea leaves in the pot at this point, because the warmth and humidity carry the aroma.
7. Rinse the leaves. Pour boiling water over the leaves, and put the lid on the vessel. Wait a few seconds, then fully decant the vessel into the pitcher. 
- If using a compressed tea, like a brick of pu'er or liu bao, you may want to rinse for as long as 30-40 seconds to help the tea open up. Some people prefer to do two short rinses of compressed teas.
- Optionally, pour some boiling water over the pot with the lid on during the rinse. This is done to help keep the pot hot, though arguable it also causes evaporative cooling. Up to you.
8. Pour the rinse water into the cups, then empty the cups. This helps keep the cups warm and you can smell the empty cups to start enjoying the fragrance of the tea.
- Some brewers like to pass the pot around, lid off, so people can appreciate the rinsed tea's fragrance.
9. Brew the infusions. Same steps as rinsing the tea: lid off, boiling water in the pot, lid on, decant into the pitcher, pour the contents of the pitcher into the cups.
- You'll have to learn the infusion times that best suit the tea you're brewing. Loose leaf (uncompressed) teas, I usually steep 5 to 8 seconds for the first infusion. For compressed teas, it can be as long as 30 seconds for the first infusion. 
- For infusions 2 and beyond, you need to adjust your infusion times based on the strength of the previous infusion while also considering how much strength is left in the tea. This varies tea to tea, but in general, brews 2-4 tend to be the strongest and don't usually require adding time. In fact, often my brewing times look like this, spiking early: rinse, 8 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds.
- Etiquette: It's polite to wait for everyone having tea with you to finish what's in their cups before you brew the next infusion, so you don't make them feel rushed. Contrarywise, it's polite when being served gongfu tea to finish your cup in time with others so you don't make them wait.
10. When done, empty the leaves from the pot using the scraper. It's handy to have a small plate or bowl for the spent leaves. Feel free to poke through them to get an appreciation for the grade of the leaf, how it was processed/oxidized, etc.

Western Style

Western or English style brewing uses large vessels, sometimes as voluminous as a liter or more, with a relatively small amount of leaf, usually a tablespoon or two. This low water to leaf ratio means the tea must be steeped for minutes to make a rich brew, and usually those leaves are not reused more than once, if at all.

How strong you take your tea is a matter of personal taste, and it's hard to give direction about how much tea to use. Here's how I steep my tea when doing it Western style:

  • Start your water to boil.
  • Preheat your teapot with hot water, either the hottest water from the tap or water that is boiling. Let this sit for a minute or so to distribute the heat evenly. Then pour out all the water.
  • Add enough leaf to barely cover the bottom of the vessel such that you can't see the bottom.
  • Pour a small amount of water over the leaves, an inch or so, to rinse the tea. Let sit a few seconds (more if the tea is compressed). Pour out the rinse water.
  • Fill the pot with boiling water and let the tea steep for three minutes.
  • When serving the tea, leave an inch or so of water in the teapot and let that keep steeping. This helps guarantee a better second infusion.
  • Brew the second infusion, making your best guess/using your intuition about how long to brew it. 

Grandpa Style

Tea blogger MarshalN coined the term "Grandpa style" to describe the casual kind of brewing his grandfather did, and which I find is the common way in China I saw people consuming tea while at work, especially taxi drivers. It's similar to western style brewing in that it uses a larger vessel, but in practice it tends to use more leaves, maybe double what someone might put in their Brown Betty teapot.

Rather than repeat his instructions, I encourage you to read his original post and his tips for successful grandpa-style brewing.

Simmering

An older and increasingly uncommon style of preparing more mellow heicha/dark teas like liu bao and Fu cha is to simmer them a short while. This is a great way to make tea to serve with a meal while still getting the most out of the tea. You want to use a low leaf to water ratio: start with 6g to 10g of leaves to every 500ml water.

You will need a vessel that you can heat on your stove or on a hot plate, so a glass kettle or even a clean cooking pot works. You'll also need a spoon, chopstick or ladle.

  • Bring 500ml to a liter of water to a boil.
  • Add a small pinch of salt to the water.
  • Place the measured tea leaves in the boiling water and stir quickly with a chopstick or spoon to wet and distribute the leaves.
  • Turn the heat down to a low simmer, and continue to simmer the leaves. The longer it boils, the thicker and sweeter it should taste. You can use a spoon or ladle to taste the tea and measure its progress. If simmering longer than 3-5 minutes, be sure to add more water as necessary.
  • Serve the simmered tea using a ladle or by carefully decanting into cups.