Water Temperature: The One Variable Most People Get Wrong
Boiling water is correct for perhaps a third of the tea in your cupboard. Here is the full temperature ladder, plus how to hit it without a thermometer.
Read the guide →Home › Brewing Guides
Brewing Guides
Everything below came out of a notebook first. No theory we have not run in the kitchen, and no advice we cannot justify with a paired cup test.
Six guides
Start with temperature, then storage
If you only read two of these, make it the temperature guide and the storage guide. Between them they fix the majority of disappointing cups — usually without spending anything.
How to Store Loose-Leaf Tea So It Lasts a Full Year
Oxygen, light, heat and odour ranked by how much damage each actually does, and why the fridge is almost always a mistake.
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Reading a Tea Label: Grades, Harvests and Marketing Noise
FTGFOP, first flush, single estate, hand-rolled. Which of these tell you something and which are decoration.
Read the guide →Caffeine in Tea: What the Numbers Actually Say
Why 'green tea has less caffeine' is only sometimes true, and how steep time changes the figure more than leaf type does.
Read the guide →Brewing Tea at Altitude: A Pagosa Springs Problem
At 7,100 feet water boils near 199 degrees. Every sea-level brewing chart is quietly wrong here. This is the correction.
Read the guide →Teaware That Earns Its Shelf Space
Four items worth buying, three that are pure decoration, and the one cheap upgrade that improves every cup immediately.
Read the guide →Quick reference
The one-line version of all six
- Green tea: 160–175 °F. Black and puerh: boiling. Oolong: 190–200 °F. White: 175 °F, longer.
- Store in opaque, airtight tins at room temperature, away from spices. Not the fridge.
- Buy by harvest date, not by grade letters. A recent harvest beats an impressive acronym.
- Steep time affects caffeine more than colour does. A three-minute green can out-caffeinate a two-minute black.
- Above 5,000 feet, add roughly 30 seconds to every steep time you read online.
- A $12 digital thermometer improves more cups than a $200 kettle.