Instructions for Brewing Various Loose Leaf Teas in Different Vessels

What’s in This Video

In this video on tea brewing basics, Zhuping reviews how to brew scented, oolong, black, and puer tea. For each of these, she discusses the ideal temperature with which to brew each of these teas and what vessels to brew them in.

This video should also give you a fair idea of how much of your tea to put in your pot. You can adjust as you get better at knowing your tastes when it comes to your tea. We intentionally include varying sized vessels so you can learn how to gauge how much is ideal for your use.

General Recommendations

Although it is not directly mentioned, teas that belong in what is regarded as the cooling family according to eastern traditions, namely, green, white, yellow, and scented teas, are best brewed at a lower temperature-somewhere in the neighborhood of 185 degrees. Teas that belong to the warming family, black tea, puer, and oolongs, are ideally brewed at boiling temperatures. For this reason, many newcomers to tea tend to begin with warming family teas since it allows them to get accustomed to their tea palettes without worrying about temperature and identifying their personal infusion preferences. Note that she prescribes leaving a little bit of water behind after each infusion you’ve poured out.

The Teas We Used

For this video cast, we use Yinhao Longzhu (Silver Dragon Jasmine Pearls) Scented Tea, Ma Liu Mi (Monkey Picked) Anxi Wulong, Jin Kong Que (Golden Peacock), Sheng Tai Chen Xiang (Premium) Loose Leaf Puer. However, the same practices can be applied to any scented tea, oolong, black tea, and puer. You can learn about each of these teas in far greater detail by visiting our Learn About Tea page where we expound on the history, harvesting methods, plucking standards, and overall descriptions for each of these categories.