How to make good tea

If you're starting from a baseline of drinking relatively cheap mass-market teabags, the easiest way to marginally improve your tea quality is by making sure you don't oversteep it. If it's a typical black tea, try 3 minutes (rather than 4-5). If it's some kind of green, try 2 minutes, and you also have a second very easy marginal improvement: use colder water. Most greens should be brewed at 175F/80C. If you don't have an adjustable-temperature tea kettle, you can get pretty close by pouring boiling water into a mug and then waiting 2-3 minutes.

But let's say you actually want to drink good tea, rather than marginal improvements on bad tea.

This post will only be covering western style brewing, which is the brewing style familiar to most westerners: one long steep, 300-400ml of water, 2-3g of tea.

Equipment

Your hard requirements are high-quality loose leaf tea, a tea scale with precision to at least 0.1 grams, and an infuser. (If you're brewing for other people, rather than just yourself, you also want a tea pot with its own infuser.) You don't want to be eyeballing quantities of loose leaf tea without a bunch of practice, and you also don't want to be stuck fishing tea leaves out of your tea^[1].

Despite my pretensions otherwise, you can in fact get away with using boiling water for pretty much any kind of tea, except most greens (and yellows). Many oolongs will take somewhat better to e.g. 190F, but boiling water will rarely be catastrophic. So while I think you should get an adjustable-temperature tea kettle^[2], it's probably not your number one priority.

How to find teas that you like

The best way to figure out what you like is to try a bunch of different things. I never shop at local tea stores because their selections are often limited and they tend to be more expensive than online vendors, holding quality constant. However, local tea stores can be great if you're just getting into tea, because they allow you to iterate quickly. It would suck to order a few different tea samples online, wait three weeks for them to ship from China, and then discover that you don't like any of them. Here are a couple of heuristics for which local tea store to pick, if you have more than one option:

• It primarily sells unflavored, unadulterated loose leaf tea. If a large percentage of their teas are "blends" or have inclusions like fruits, flowers, herbs, etc, this is a sign that they are less focused on sourcing and selling the kinds of teas that I would find interesting^[3].
• It sells tea in small enough quantities that it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg just to try a tea. 5-10 grams is ideal; 20-30 grams is often still tolerable, price-wise^[4]. Some places will also serve you a flight of teas in-store; this can be a pretty efficient way to try a few - but mind your caffeine consumption. However, you will in all likelihood need to make peace with buying tea samples and then giving the rest away after trying them once (or letting them collect dust on your shelves). Life is too short to drink sunk cost fallacy tea.

Online vendors based in the US are a bit of a middle ground - their shipping speeds, breadth of selection, and prices will often be somewhere in between your local brick-and-mortar and online Chinese vendors. Some of them even explicitly operate as resellers for vendors from other countries^[5].

A Digression on Variety

The amount of variety in tea is enormous. In the past 4 years, I've tried on the order of 40 different productions of black tea (not counting productions of the "same" tea across different years). Within those, there have probably been at least ten meaningful "clusters" in terms of profile. Some clusters are obvious - while there are perceptible^[6] differences between different productions of unsmoked lapsang, it is generally extremely obvious that "unsmoked lapsang" is a distinct style, and different instances of it will usually be much closer to each other in terms of flavor profile than they will be to other styles of black tea.

It's pretty common for tea enthusiasts to develop a strong and enduring preference for a subset of the broader categories (black^[7]/white/oolong/green/yellow/dark^[8]), and for distinct styles/profiles within those categories, but it's worth exploring pretty widely before settling down.

My Recommended Teas

People's tastes in tea vary wildly. My recommendations will probably be more opinionated than the many others' would be; I often like more experimental teas that don't belong to well-recognized existing styles.

Black Tea

I usually like black teas that are on the sweeter side, with malty or fruity profiles. I usually disprefer floral profiles. Here are some black teas I've been fond of lately:

• w2t Honey Needle
• w2t Fox Down (The Steeping Room also sells this one, but only the full 200g cake, not the 25g sample)
• w2t Dualist (sold out, but might come back in a future year)
• w2t Sugar Rush

White Tea

White tea used to be categorized into 4 "grades":

1. Baihao Yinzhen (Silver Needle)
2. Baimudan
3. Gongmei
4. Shoumei

These grades tracked how early in the season the tea was picked, and thus the ratio of buds to leaves. Silver Needle is all buds, Shoumei all leaves. Recently, gongmei was redefined to refer to a specific heirloom varietal, at least within Fuding. I have no idea whether gongmei-varietal teas also receive a grade from one of the remaining 3 grades.

Silver Needle is the most expensive, but also the most divisive. I haven't had one that I've liked. I'm generally not a huge fan of "standard" fresh white teas; I like aged and experimental (and often pressed^[9]) whites. So my recommendations here are not a very good representation of what most people think of when they think of "white tea".

• PPX 1232^[10]
• w2t 2014 Shoumei^[11]
• w2t Charing Cross
• w2t Marion
• dxjd^[12] 2009 Shoumei

Oolong Tea

It was an oolong that got me into this mess. Alas, but not all first loves last forever: my tastes have changed and I basically no longer drink oolong. But if you forced me to drink an oolong I'd probably go with a reasonably high-grade Tie Guan Yin^[13].

Green Tea

A green was my second love. Unlike oolong, I still like a high-quality longjing or bi luo chun, but I never find myself reaching for them first.

Yellow Tea

I've only tried one and it really just felt like a slightly weird green. Maybe there's more to this category but I'm not the one to tell you about it.

Dark Tea

Practically unknown in the west except by tea nerds, dark (fermented) tea is nearly as popular as black (red) tea in China. (Both are dwarfed by green tea, which accounts for more than half of domestic Chinese tea production and sales.)

There's a bunch of subtypes here that I won't get into, since I don't drink any of them (yet). My few experiences with puerh suggest a wide variety of dirt partially decomposed plant matter fermented flavor notes, but that might've just been me running into shou instead of sheng. I hope to broaden my horizons one day!

1. ^{^}

   There is a style of brewing and drinking tea called "grandpa", which doesn't use an infuser... and also doesn't remove the tea leaves from the tea. You refill your cup with hot water when you're done. I don't do this; you're welcome to experiment. Oolongs, whites, and some puerhs and greens will be best-suited for this - generally aim for teas that are less tannic.

2. ^{^}

   I'm partial to the Cuisinart, but you can get something cheaper, as long as it has options in the 170-180F (green) and 185-195F (oolong, sometimes white) range.

3. ^{^}

   Exceptions no doubt exist, but the correlation I've noticed is pretty strong.

4. ^{^}

   Remember that brewing a single cup of tea requires 2-3 grams.

5. ^{^}

   The Steeping Room is one example I'm familiar with - they stock a selection of teas from white2tea, often with no or minimal markup. (I assume they buy them in bulk at a discount.)

6. ^{^}

   To some people. Often comes with experience.

7. ^{^}

   Also known as red tea.

8. ^{^}

   Fermented teas - most famously, puerh.

9. ^{^}

   Generally cakes, not bricks.

10. ^{^}

    This got me into white tea. Unfortunately, it's only available in China, so you'll either need to scour taobao and risk a couple hundred bucks on a large quantity, or drink tea with me and remind me to break into my stash. The producer's name is pinpinxiang (品品香).

11. ^{^}

    Year specified because it's pretty different from their "generic" shoumei production from subsequent years.

12. ^{^}

    They currently seem to not be selling anything, alas.

13. ^{^}

    Many vendors that sell oolongs will sell one or more kind of Tie Guan Yin; Yunnan Sourcing's is decent but they're probably not the best vendor to order from if you just want to try the one thing.

Discuss