Brewing Methods
How to Brew and Taste Tea
There are many ways of brewing and drinking tea. Every way that owns its advantages and disadvantage is introduced as follows:
1. Brewing with pottery & porcelain or glass cups: For personal brewing at home or in the office, those cups are usually used to prepare tea. It's an easy and convenient method. As tea leaves always steep in tea liquor, therefore, tea liquor always produce unpleasant bitterness and astringency.2. Brewing with a big teapot: For meeting or family consumption, a big teapot is usually used to prepare tea. This method is more practical based on the constant ratio of volume of teas to waters. The general standard ratio is one to fifty. Steep the tea for 5 to 6 minutes before serving. After pouring tea liquors into the serving pot and then drinking the tea to enjoy the pleasant flavor and taste.
3. Brewing with tea ceremony: Chinese tea ceremony has its peculiarities and uniqueness. At first, you should have one set of tea utensils including teapot, teacups, tea bowl, tea boat, serving pot, tea towel and teakettle etc. The proper way of brewing tea is introduced as follows:
Use the tea scoop to take some of the tea from the tea canister to put into the teapot. The tea should be filled 1/4 to 1/3 full of the teapot. Normally, don’t add too much tea leaves if the tea leaves are already highly shrinking.‚ After pouring boiling water (mixing 75~80℃ water with green tea) into the teapot, brew the tea for about one minute. After brewing, pour the tea liquors into the serving pot. In order to make tea liquors uniformly light or heavy in each drinking cup, the tea liquors should be swirled back and forth before it is poured into the cups. Some people firstly brew tea for few seconds and then pour the tea into tea cups and serving cup, and then dump the tea liquor away without drinking it. That is for increasing the temperatures of tea cups, teapot, and serving cup to promote the tea leaves evaporating tea aroma. This process is called as “Warm and Moisture mixing”.
ƒ For the second brewing, boiling water is again poured into the teapot. However, for each serving, normally wait about 15 to 20 seconds more over the last serving for tea to set down.