I Bought a Scale - Now a Question About Water Quantity

Warning - be prepared for a silly question from a newbie - please don't mock me.

After the discussion about giving scales to newbies I ended up ordering a scale and a thermometer from Upton teas. Now I'm obsessing about water quantity. The cup weight measure on the scale is calibrated to a 6 oz cup. When I brew tea the tea leaves absorb water so am I supposed to start out with 6 oz of water, or use more so that I end up with 6 oz of tea?

TIA, Janice

Reply to
Janice
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It is assuming 6 fluid ounces of water to start out with. This SHOULD also give you 6 fluid ounces of tea at the end after the leaves are removed.

To be honest, though, the difference is minimal.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

You can vary the amount of tea, the amount of water, the temperature, or the steeping time to achieve the optimum brew.

Scales and thermometers come into play when the tea heads are doing comparative tastings and want to share their results via correspondance.

Reply to
beecrofter

Yes, but it becomes more than minimal when you use lots of leaf, as in gongfu.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

I'll follow up on MarshalN's wisdom with what I tell people in my tea classes: "If you brew using the wrong kind of water at the wrong temperature, with the wrong amount of tea, for the wrong time and you like what you get at the end, you brewed it EXACTLY right."

That said, what I sometimes do with a new tea is control for everything but time (measure some known amount of tea, water, and temperature), then pour out a tiny sample cup of liquor every 30 seconds or so--or shorter intervals if it's a fancy tea. That way I get a sense of how it performs over time. Once I have a time I like, I keep that constant and fiddle with one of the other factors.

You can get tea drunk doing this, but you end up really knowing how to get the flavors you want out of a tea.

(BTW: I accidentally steeped a cooked/black/shu puer for 4 days once...still drinkable! Wouldn't do it with a raw though...)

Reply to
Tea Geek

I went through a serious stage of obsessing about every tea factor. If you are at all like me, though, that process is for your benefit only. In other words, it isn't so much the amounts you use as it is the consistency with which you do it. The consistency helps you learn how to brew tea. If you brew 6oz of water with 6g of leaves every time then you will get a sense for what that is like. If you use 6.2 oz. of water with 6g of leaves every time, then you will get a sense of what that is like. Eventually, you may decide that 6.2oz tastes better than

6oz, or that 5g of leaves is all you need to make a good cup of tea instead of 7g. At some point, you will likely become familiar with what it takes to brew a good cup of tea without using precise measuring devices.

Having said that, I use a very small (less than 6oz) yixing pot and put as much water as it will let me. I do weigh out the amount of leaves I use, but don't time my brewings much anymore. When I brew the first brew, I get slightly more tea than when I brew my fifth brew, because there is less room for water once the leaves expand. So the amount of water I use changes as I brew and there is nothing I can do about it due to the size limitations of my pot. I personally feel that using too much water is worse than using too little because I'm not so crazy about weak tea.

And if you are using a scale to weigh your tea, you will likely be mocked. I know I am, though I enjoy that as part of my tea routine in the morning (not the mocking, the tea weighing).

cha bing

Reply to
cha bing

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