What’s The Worst Mistake Made In Brewing Tea?

Burning Your Leaves

There is an art to heating water for your tea. You probably know already that boiling water will ruin most green teas. It will in essence burn your tea leaves if you pour boiling or near boiling water over most green tea leaves.

(This is something important to keep in mind even when you’re brewing a quick mug of bagged tea. What I do when I’m using bagged tea (which is rarely, but I do on occasion) is I boil the water and pour it into my mug without the tea bag. If the mug is cold, the heat quickly goes into the sides of the mug and heats it up. Somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute I find to be optimal for most bagged teas. Experiment.)

What’s The RIGHT Temperature, If Not Boiling?

It depends on the type of tea you’re brewing. I experiment to find the right temperature with any given tea. There are optimal temperature guidelines given by the National Tea Jury, according to wikipedia, but I will admit that I’m a bit too lazy to use a thermometer to measure the precise heat of my water. Besides, to me it seems to take a bit of the magic and wonder and ceremony out of tea-making. Finding the right temperature to use with various teas is a skill that is developed over time by experimentation. That said, there are some general guidelines you can follow.

I pulled some numbers from wikipedia:

Pu-erh: Optimum temperatures are generally regarded to be around 95 degree Celsius for lower quality pu’ers and 85–89 degree Celsius for good ripened and aged raw pu’er.

Oolong 82-80 degrees C

Sencha: 65-80 degrees C

Gyokuro 50-60 degrees C

So, the general rule, as you can see, is that those teas that have been oxidised more require higher temperatures of water to bring out the flavor.

A general practice of mine when brewing my tea is to boil water and then pour the water into an empty teapot. Especially if the teapot is cold, it will cool off the water fairly quickly. After about 30 seconds to a minute I use the water (making sure, of course, to heat the teapot I will use for brewing and the cups I will be using. This becomes important the more you cool off the water).

One general rule of thumb that I use: err on the water being too cool rather than too hot. That way I don’t burn my leaves, and if the water is on the cooler side, then I just let the leaves infuse longer.