Recommended Steeping Times and Temperatures

Debunking Steeping Instructions

If you drink tea, chances are you’ve come across a chart of recommended steeping times and temperatures.  Most tea comes with recommended brewing guidelines, be it a loose-leaf tea from a high end specialty tea company or a box of teabags from the supermarket.  It may be a full table with all types of teas listed, or it might be guidelines for only the tea you hold in your hand.

These are very useful guidelines, but far too often we take them as absolutely rigid instructions on how the tea must be made.  We can feel that any variation from the instructions is forbidden and will horribly ruin your tea if not followed to the letter.  It’s natural to see the brewing instructions from the tea seller to be the authoritative version of how the tea should be made.

However, if one compares the brewing style of any two tea professionals chances are that their brewing parameters will be different, yet each will serve an equally pleasurable cup of tea.

So what is the purpose of recommended brewing guidelines?  When do we follow them and when do we not?  How do we simply and quickly brew a nice cup of tea?

The key here is that these are indeed just recommendations.  They’re a great starting point, and give you an idea of what to try when brewing the tea.  What they are not is a rigid rule on how the tea must be made.  There are too many factors that differ among tea drinkers so no one set of rules is going to be appropriate for everyone.  The tea sellers know that their customers will need to tweak the brewing parameters a bit to get the tea results they desire, and will not take offense when you deviate from their recommendations.

The first thing to realize is that most tea guidelines are made with a type of teaware in mind.  Usually that is an English style ceramic teapot of a fairly large size, say large enough to fill four to six standard teacups.  The guidelines also assume that you will be using a standard teapot amount of tea leaf, say a few teaspoons worth of leaf per pot.  One often hears the phrase “One for each cup, and one for the pot,” and that’s about the amount of teaspoons of leaf assumed here.

Why does the type of teaware make a difference?

First, the proportion of water to tea leaf has a huge impact on your cup of tea.  The western teapot brewing method uses a small amount of leaf for a large volume of water. This means that it takes several minutes for the leaf to extract all of the flavor needed. When you see guidelines suggesting three to five minutes to brew a green tea this is a sign that they intended the guidelines for English style brewing. 

Second, large teapots tend to absorb and retain a large amount of heat.  It’s important to pre-warm your teapot with hot water to minimize the amount of cooling the water experiences when poured into a cold pot.  The heat retained by a thick teapot also makes it difficult to avoid overheating delicate teas, so temperature recommendations for green teas will usually be very low, say 175°F or 80°C.

However, if you are using something other than a large teapot these guidelines may not be appropriate for you.  If you use a very small single-serving teapot for instance, or a basket infuser for your mug, you will likely use a higher leaf-to-water ratio and thus require shorter steeping times to fully infuse.  Similarly, small teapots usually retain less heat so it may make sense to use water that is a little hotter to get the same results as you would with a giant Brown Betty teapot.

Tea charts are helpful, but not absolute.

Teaware differences though are not the only reason to stray from recommended steeping guidelines.  The typical tea chart lists times and temperatures for different categories of tea, not specific to an individual tea.  One temperature and brewing time for green tea does not give the best results for all types of green tea.  Good tea shops typically provide individualized brewing parameters for each tea.

A brewing chart might suggest that black teas be infused at full boiling water for five minutes.  Even if you are using an English style teapot this might not be optimal for the black tea in your pot.  A black tea made of tiny torn leaf fragments or fannings will brew much faster than a whole leaf tea so five minutes may be much too long to avoid bitterness.  Tiny delicate black leaf teas, such as top-tier Chinese jin jun mei may get much better results with cooler water in order to bring out subtle notes.  

Personal preferences also come into play with recommended guidelines.  Some people prefer their black teas to be bolder, their greens to be sweeter, or their whites to be more delicate.  Departing a bit from the recommended brewing times and temperatures is the way to achieve this.  This is where the art of tea comes into play.  To achieve results that please you do not hesitate to deviate from the guidelines and experiment with the key brewing parameters:  leaf, time, and temperature.

“Leaf” refers to the proportion of tea leaf to water.  If you want your tea bolder or find it a bit flat try adding additional leaf.  If the tea is too strong or has unpleasant notes, reduce the amount of leaf in your pot.  Smaller amounts of tea leaf can sometimes bring out subtle flavor notes and aromas that get stomped on when using more leaf.

“Time” of course is the steeping time.  This is more flexible than people tend to realize.  Try taking a sip of tea occasionally as it brews to see if it has reached the desired flavor profile.  Often this will be well before the recommended steeping times.  Other teas have much different flavors come out with extended steeps.  For instance, ripe shou pu-erh tea infuses quickly to a dark liquor full of flavor, sometimes in seconds.  If one lets that same pu-erh steep for five minutes more than recommended it may transform into a different tea entirely with woody or sweet notes not found with a shorter steeping.

“Temperature” is the most critical and variable brewing parameter.  It may seem obvious that bold teas like black and pu-erh teas should be made at very hot temperatures, and greens and whites should be made with made with much lower temperatures.  However if one experiments one will often be surprised.  A green that tastes underwhelming and flat can be suddenly bursting with savory notes if one does a rapid infusion with very hot water.  A different green may be so very delicate that it will become astringent if one uses water any hotter than slightly steaming.  Playing with temperatures that are far different than the recommended guidelines will teach you a lot about your tea and the flavors it is hiding.

These three parameters balance against each other.  Adjusting one may require adjusting another in the opposite direction.  If you make the water much hotter, you may wish to reduce the steeping time (as in the example above).  If the water is made cooler then extend the steeping time, or add more leaf to get the same brewing intensity.  If you add more leaf, reduce the steeping time or the water temperature.  

There are any number of ways to play with these parameters, even with the same tea.  In the usual method of making iced tea one creates a strong batch of hot tea by brewing much longer than normal or by adding more leaf.  Some people do both.  If you wish to reduce astringency in the tea you can use much more leaf and brew for the normal amount instead, useful for those who wish to avoid using sweetener to counter bitterness.  Or, one could go to the extreme and make iced tea by brewing the normal amount of leaf in cold water for hours, a method called cold brewing.

While all of this may seem overwhelming, you do not require years of mentoring by a tea master in order to get a cup of tea you enjoy.  Tea guidelines serve a very useful purpose as a good starting point.  Try the guidelines as suggested, but don’t limit yourself to them.  If you aren’t pleased with the results try playing with the time, temperature, or leaf.  With practice, almost any tea can be made into a worthwhile cup for your particular tastes.