Water, temperature, time — and what to do when you have no thermometer, no scale, and hard water out of the tap. Which is most American kitchens.
The same leaf, brewed at 70°C and at boiling point, gives you two different drinks. Not a good one and a bad one — two different ones. The cooler cup is rounder and sweeter and heavier in the mouth. The hotter cup is sharper, with the astringency left in and the aroma pushed up. Both are the tea doing what it does.
So we are not going to hand you the correct number, because there isn't one.
What follows is the range, and which way to move it. Hotter and shorter brings out aroma and edge. Cooler and longer brings out sweetness and body. Everything else is a matter of what you feel like drinking.
Japanese tea was built around Japanese water, which is soft — under 100 mg/L of dissolved minerals, and usually somewhere between 30 and 80. Much of the United States is harder than that. In hard water the colour goes pale, the fresh aroma drops away, and the cup tips toward bitterness. It is the single biggest reason a good Japanese tea disappoints someone abroad.
If your tap runs hard, filtered water fixes it. If you would rather not think about it, bottled water is the easy answer — but not any bottle.
Purified or reverse-osmosis water sits at almost zero and works, though it can taste a little flat. If your tap water smells of chlorine, bring it to a boil once and let it stand for a minute; the smell goes.
You do not need a variable-temperature kettle. Japanese households have been doing this with two vessels and no instruments for a very long time. Water loses roughly 5 to 10°C every time it is poured from one vessel into another.
Your cups end up warm, which is the other reason it is done this way. If you would rather just wait: boiling water left to stand for two to three minutes lands around 80°C.
Recipes written in Japan say 4 grams. An American teaspoon holds closer to 2 grams of Japanese tea, not 4 — the leaf is finer and lighter than what those spoons were sized for. If you own a kitchen scale, use it; tea is one of the few things where a scale genuinely changes the result. If you don't, start at two heaped teaspoons per cup and adjust from there.
And if you have no teapot at all: a basket infuser in a mug works. Give the leaf room to open — a cramped ball infuser is the one thing that will not work.
Each bag says which of these it is. These are starting points, not rules — move them toward the cup you want. Where a range is given, the lower end is sweeter and rounder, the higher end sharper and more aromatic.
| Tea | Leaf | Water | Temperature | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steamed — savory | 4 g | 200 ml (7 oz) | 70°C (158°F) | 90 sec |
| Steamed — bright | 4 g | 200 ml (7 oz) | 90°C (194°F) | 30–60 sec |
| Roasted | 2–3 g per 100 ml | 200 ml (7 oz) | Straight off the boil | 30 sec |
| Black tea | 3 g | 200 ml (7 oz) | 95°C (203°F) | 2–3 min |
Scroll the table sideways on a narrow screen.
The roasted one is drunk for aroma — the roast itself — and aroma needs boiling water to lift. Cool it down and you lose the very thing you opened the bag for.
The black tea needs the heat for a different reason: it is fully oxidised, and below boiling it never quite opens. Give it two to three minutes. It is made from the same plant as the sencha, on the same hillside, and it tends to come out softer and rounder than the black tea most people are used to — so it takes milk less kindly, and needs no sugar to be drinkable.
Hotter, and shorter — this is the one rule that holds for everything in the box. The leaf has already opened, so the second pour needs almost no time — often ten to fifteen seconds is plenty. Most Japanese teas give three cups. Stop when it stops being interesting.
The easiest thing in this whole page, and the one most likely to convert somebody. Cold water pulls out sweetness and leaves most of the astringency behind, so it is very hard to get wrong.
If you only try one thing from this page in summer, try this with the roasted bag. It comes out clearer and more toasted cold than it ever does hot.
Away from light, heat, humidity, and strong smells.
Tea takes on whatever is around it. That is the whole of the storage problem, and it is why the four things above are the four things above.
The freezer is fine, and will hold it for months. One rule, and it matters: let the bag come back to room temperature before you open it. Open it cold and moisture condenses straight onto the leaf, which is the fastest way to ruin good tea.
An airtight container in a cool dark cupboard. Not the refrigerator — the leaf picks up the smell of everything else in there. Not beside the stove. Not on a sunny counter. Not next to the coffee or the spice rack. Use it within a month; after that it is still perfectly good to drink, it just stops being what you paid for.
Write and tell us. That is not a complaint — it is the brief for the next one. Too sharp means cooler water or less time. Flat and thin usually means hard water, not bad tea. And if it simply isn't the tea you were hoping for, say so plainly: the whole point of the way we do this is that somebody is choosing for you, and we can only get it right next time if we know.