Most bad cups of tea are made from good tea.
The leaf did its job in the garden and the factory. What happens in your kitchen decides the rest, and it comes down to three variables: what water you use, how hot it is, and how long the leaf sits in it. Get those right and cheap tea tastes decent. Get them wrong and you can ruin a second-flush orthodox that took a year to grow.
Water: the ingredient nobody thinks about
A cup of tea is roughly 99% water. It's worth about ninety seconds of attention.
Use fresh water, and boil it once. Water that has been sitting in the kettle since morning, or boiled and re-boiled, has lost dissolved oxygen. This isn't folklore. Oxygen carries aroma compounds up out of the cup, and flat water gives you a flat brew. You can taste the difference side by side.
Mineral content matters more than you'd guess. Around 50 to 100 ppm of total dissolved solids is the sweet spot. Very hard water — high in calcium and magnesium — mutes flavour, dulls the colour, and creates that greasy film on the surface of black tea. Distilled or heavily filtered water goes the other way and tastes hollow, because the minerals are part of what pulls flavour out of the leaf. If your tap water is hard, a simple carbon filter usually gets you close enough.
Don't use hot water from the tap. It sits in a tank, picks up metal, and has never been properly aerated.
Temperature: the variable that punishes mistakes
This is where most people go wrong, and it's almost always the same mistake: boiling water on delicate leaf.
Green and white teas contain catechins that turn harshly astringent above about 85°C. Pour a rolling boil over green tea and you get a stewed, bitter, faintly metallic cup, and you will conclude that you don't like green tea. You do. You just cooked it.
Black tea has the opposite problem. It's fully oxidised, the cell walls are broken down, and it needs genuine heat to release anything. Lukewarm water on a strong Assam gives you weak, thin, brownish disappointment.
| Tea type | Temperature | Time | Leaf per 200ml |
|---|---|---|---|
| Green | 70–80°C | 1–3 min | 2 g |
| White | 75–85°C | 3–5 min | 2.5 g |
| Oolong | 85–95°C | 3–5 min | 2.5 g |
| Black (orthodox) | 95–100°C | 3–5 min | 2 g |
| Black (CTC) | 100°C | 2–3 min | 2 g |
| Herbal / tisane | 100°C | 5–10 min | 2–3 g |
No thermometer? Boil the kettle and wait. In an open cup, water drops roughly 10°C in the first minute and keeps falling. Two minutes off the boil puts you around 80°C, which is green tea territory. Alternatively, pour boiling water into a cold cup first and let it sit, then transfer.
Time: less forgiving than you think
Steeping is a sequence, not a single event. The pleasant compounds come out first and the harsh ones follow.
In the first minute or two you get amino acids like theanine, which taste sweet and savoury, plus most of the aromatics. Caffeine comes out fast too, so a short steep is not a low-caffeine steep. After three or four minutes, tannins start dominating, and past five you're mostly extracting bitterness and dryness.
This is why oversteeping can't be fixed by adding water. Diluting an over-extracted brew gives you weak bitter tea instead of strong bitter tea.
Time by the clock, not by colour. Assam turns dark within thirty seconds and looks ready long before it is. Some green teas stay pale even when they're overdone.
Take the leaf out. Move it to another cup, lift the infuser, remove the bag. A bag left in the mug keeps brewing until you've finished drinking, and the last mouthful is always the worst one.
And don't squeeze the bag. That squeeze pushes concentrated tannin straight into your cup.
The leaf-to-water ratio
Roughly 2 to 2.5 grams per 200ml cup, which for most whole-leaf teas is a rounded teaspoon.
Judge by weight rather than volume where you can. Big fluffy white teas and long twisted oolongs take up enormous space for very little mass, so a teaspoon of those is barely one gram. CTC granules are dense and a teaspoon can be three grams or more.
If the tea tastes weak, add leaf rather than time. If it tastes harsh, cut the time rather than the leaf. Those two adjustments solve most problems.
Two different methods, two different logics
Everything above describes steeping — hot water poured over leaf and left alone. It's the right method for orthodox whole-leaf teas, for anything delicate, and for tasting a tea properly.
Boiling is a different technique with different rules, and it's the basis of Indian chai. You're not steeping here, you're simmering: leaf, water, milk and spices cooked together, often for several minutes, deliberately extracting the tannins that steeping tries to avoid. The milk fat and sugar bind those tannins and turn what would be harsh into something round and full.
A workable stovetop chai:
- Bring 100ml water to a boil with crushed ginger, a bruised cardamom pod and a small piece of cinnamon if you like it.
- Add 1½ teaspoons of strong CTC and boil for two minutes.
- Add 100ml full-fat milk and bring back to a simmer, watching it so it doesn't climb the pan.
- Simmer two to three minutes more, sweeten, and strain.
The tea you use matters here. This method demolishes a delicate leaf. It needs a robust Assam CTC, which is exactly what CTC was engineered for.
Getting more from good leaf
Whole-leaf orthodox tea is worth re-steeping. The second infusion is often the best one — the leaves have opened fully and the sharper edges have gone. Add thirty seconds or so to each subsequent steep. Good oolongs will go five or six rounds.
Warm the pot or cup with a splash of hot water first and tip it out. Cold ceramic pulls several degrees off your brewing temperature immediately.
Give the leaf room. Tea needs to unfurl and circulate. A cramped ball infuser holds the leaf compressed so only the outside brews, which is why a proper pot or a wide basket infuser makes a noticeable difference with the same tea.
Milk, if you take it
The milk-first question has been argued for three hundred years. The practical case for milk first is that it prevents the milk proteins from scalding on contact with near-boiling tea, giving a smoother result. The practical case for milk last is that you can see the colour and stop when it looks right.
Either works. What matters more is that milk suits full-bodied black tea and ruins nearly everything else. It flattens green tea, buries white tea entirely, and wastes an oolong.
Six mistakes worth fixing tonight
- Boiling water on green tea.
- Re-boiled or long-standing kettle water.
- Leaving the bag or infuser in the cup.
- Judging readiness by colour.
- Squeezing the bag.
- Storing tea near the stove, the spice rack or a sunny windowsill. Tea absorbs odours and hates light and heat. An airtight opaque tin in a cool cupboard, away from coffee and masala.
