Almost every tea instruction you have read says "one teaspoon per cup". It is a bad unit, and it is the reason a lot of good tea gets brewed badly.
A teaspoon measures volume, and tea leaf varies enormously in density. A teaspoon of fine broken black tea might be three grams. A teaspoon of fluffy white tea buds or whole-leaf oolong might be one and a half. A teaspoon of chamomile flowers is mostly air. Same spoon, half the tea, and a cup that tastes thin through no fault of the leaf.
Weight fixes it. A scale that reads to a gram is the cheapest real improvement available to anyone who drinks loose tea, and it turns brewing from a series of guesses into something repeatable.
The ratios worth starting from
A useful general rule: one gram of leaf per 60 to 70 millilitres of water. That works out to about three grams for a 200 ml cup, or five grams for a large mug.
By style, as starting points rather than laws:
- Black tea: 2 to 3 g per 200 ml.
- Green tea: 2 to 3 g per 200 ml.
- White tea: 3 to 4 g per 200 ml. It is light and bulky, so it needs more than it looks like it needs.
- Oolong, Western style: 3 g per 200 ml.
- Oolong or pu-erh, small-pot style: 5 to 8 g per 100 ml, with short infusions.
- Rooibos: 2 to 3 g per 200 ml.
- Chamomile: 2 to 3 g per 200 ml.
- Peppermint: about 2 g per 200 ml. Less than you think.
- Hibiscus: about 2 g per 200 ml. Much less than you think.
- Lemon balm: 3 to 4 g per 200 ml. Much more than you think, because it is mild.
- Cold brew, any type: about 1 g per 100 ml, in the refrigerator, eight to twelve hours.
Temperature, without a fancy kettle
Water temperature matters most for green and white tea, where boiling water produces the harsh, bitter cup that convinces people they dislike green tea.
Rough targets: green 70–80°C, white 80–85°C, green oolong 85–90°C, roasted oolong 90–95°C, black 95–100°C, pu-erh 95–100°C, and herbal infusions at a full boil.
Without a variable-temperature kettle, there is a reliable trick that is just arithmetic: mixing boiling water with room-temperature water gives you the weighted average of the two. Taking boiling as 100°C and room temperature as 20°C, two parts boiling to one part room-temperature lands around 73°C, three parts to one lands around 80°C, and four parts to one lands around 84°C. Pour the cold water into the cup first, then top it with boiling. Expect the real figure a degree or two lower again, because a room-temperature cup or pot takes some heat out of the water, and lower still if your room is cold. This is more accurate than waiting and guessing, because how fast a kettle cools depends on the kettle, the room and how full it is.
Time, and the mistake everyone makes
Steep times: green one to two minutes, white two to four, oolong two to three Western style, black three to five, pu-erh three to five after a rinse, herbal infusions four to six with the cup covered.
The mistake: when a cup is too weak, people steep longer. That does not make tea stronger, it makes it more bitter. Strength comes from the leaf-to-water ratio; bitterness and astringency come from time and temperature. If your cup is thin, use more leaf and the same time. If it is harsh, use the same leaf and less time or cooler water.
Cover the cup or pot while it steeps, particularly for peppermint, chamomile and green tea. The aromatics you paid for go up with the steam.
And most good loose tea will give you a second infusion, sometimes a third. Rolled oolongs and pu-erh will give five or six and change noticeably each round, which is the actual reason to buy them.
Storage, by type
What degrades tea is moisture, odour, light and air — roughly in that order, and more than time does.
- Everything: airtight, opaque, dry, and nowhere near the spice shelf or the coffee. Tea is hygroscopic and it will take on the smell of its neighbours within days and keep it.
- Green tea is the most perishable thing on the shelf. Six to twelve months from harvest for the cup as intended. The harvest date is more informative than any best-before date.
- Cold storage works for green tea, sealed and unopened — this is standard trade practice. The rule that makes it safe: bring the sealed packet fully to room temperature before opening it, every time. Open it cold and water condenses onto the leaf, and damp green tea is spoiled rather than merely faded.
- Do not refrigerate an opened packet of any tea, for the same reason.
- Black tea: one to two years, and forgiving. Store it airtight and dark and forget about it.
- White tea: one to two years fresh; pressed white tea cakes are aged deliberately and are a different proposition.
- Oolong splits by roast. Green, unroasted oolongs behave like green tea and want cold, sealed storage. Roasted oolongs behave like black tea and many improve over their first year.
- Pu-erh is the exception to every rule here. It is meant to breathe, so an airtight container is wrong for it. Keep cakes in their paper, in a box or clay jar, at stable room temperature, with some air exchange, and far away from anything aromatic. Pu-erh absorbs smells more readily than any other tea and keeps them permanently.
- Rooibos and hibiscus: two years or more. Both are genuinely durable. Keep them dry — both clump badly if damp gets in.
- A chai blend is limited by whichever spice fades first, usually the cardamom. Keep the pods whole in the blend if you can.
How to tell a tea is done
Smell the dry leaf: if it smells of paper, or of the cupboard, rather than of tea, that is your answer. Then brew it and smell the used leaf. In a live tea, the wet leaf smells better and more complex than the dry leaf did. If the wet leaf gives you almost nothing, the tea has nothing left to give the cup either, and no adjustment to ratio or temperature will retrieve it.
About this article
Leaf & Larder has no licence and no stock yet, and nothing here is an offer to sell anything. This is editorial writing about cooking. It makes no medical or health benefit claims about any ingredient, and where we did not know something we left it out rather than guessing.