Loose Leaf Tea 101 - How to Make Loose Leaf Tea for Beginners

So you just got some loose leaf tea, now what? In this video, we're going to give you a step-by-step guide for preparing your first cup of loose leaf tea. We'll show you how to brew loose leaf tea with a teapot, and how to brew loose leaf tea without a teapot. Don't be intimidated, this process is much easier than you might think, and we're going to go through it together. So there are many benefits to choosing loose leaf tea over teabags when it comes to taste, health benefits, and versatility. But the one downside is you will need to know a couple things first. So let's say that you just got your pack of loose leaf tea from Neoteas.com. The first step is to determine what type of tea it is, so you can establish the three brewing parameters. Leaf to water ratio, water temperature, and brewing time. Think of these three brewing parameters as a type of recipe. The brewing temperature and time will determine what is extracted from the leaf, and in what ratios. So by changing how you brew the tea, you will actually change the ingredients within the cup of tea itself. This can affect the taste, the color, and the health benefits of the tea, as different compounds of the leaf make their way into your cup. So what's the best way to brew loose leaf tea then? Well that depends on what type of tea you're brewing. The leaf to water ratio is the first consideration to make, so you know exactly how much tea to take out of your pack. In the US and Europe, a lot of loose leaf teas will make the recommendation of using 2 grams of leaves and about 400 milliliters of water. This is referred to as western style brewing, and it produces a larger quantity of relatively weak tasting tea. When preparing traditional Chinese and Japanese teas, we recommend to use a much greater leaf to water ratio. This will give you a more concentrated and flavorful cup of tea that tastes like a juice, rather than a fragrant cup of hot water. When you brew tea in smaller quantities like this, and savor each and every sip, the drinking experience is much more enjoyable. You can really focus on engaging your senses and appreciating the subtle aspects of the tea, like the richer color, texture, aroma, and taste. To create that perfect cup of tea, we recommend to use 5 grams of leaves and 150 milliliters of water. The reason we measure out the tea in grams and not teaspoons, is because the shape of a tea will vary greatly. For example, the leaves of this Bansha green tea are larger and more loosely packed, so it takes up more space. The leaves of this Gyokoro green tea are very tightly rolled, so it takes up less space. To truly get an accurate measure of the tea, you will want to weigh it out. If you don't have a scale at home, you can just start with a leveled out tablespoon of leaves, which should work, at least for most types of Japanese green tea. Next, for the water, if you have a scale, you can measure out 150 milliliters easily, because 1 milliliter of water is approximately 1 gram. If you don't have a scale, you can measure out 1 half cup of water, which will be approximately 120 milliliters. Close enough for now. So next, we're going to talk about the temperature and why it matters. But before we do that, let's take a quick detour to talk about teaware, and why you are making the right decision by switching to loose leaf tea. When you prepare tea in a tea bag, the bag itself is acting as the strainer, filtering out the leaves so they don't end up in your cup. Unfortunately, most of these tea bags contain a lot of harmful materials like plastic, bleached paper, glue, staples, and string. This will of course have an impact on the flavor of the tea you are preparing, as well as the health benefits. In addition to the tea bag itself being harmful, it also tends to be a way to disguise lower quality leaves. These are the leftover leaves and stems of the tea production process, ground up into a dust, and then put into a tea bag. These leaves don't offer the same nutrients of premium loose leaf tea, and they produce a flat and bitter flavor. Of course, there are varying levels of quality within tea bags, but the best tea leaves are reserved for loose leaf tea. The reason for this is that these top quality leaves would be wasted if they needed to be ground up and put into a bleached tea bag. So instead, they are almost always sold in loose leaf tea. These loose leaf teas not only produce better tasting brews, but they offer a wider variety. Tea bags are mass produced so that each one tastes the same, while the flavors in small batch loose leaf teas can vary based on where the tea was produced, how it was grown, picked, and processed. There's a whole world of teas to explore, and once you learn how to prepare loose leaf tea, you will have access to all of it. The only thing you'll need is a strainer, to separate out the leaves as you pour. These tea strainers can be a great way to get started into the world of loose leaf tea, but we also recommend that you eventually upgrade to a teapot. The reason for this is that a teapot has a wider base, which allows the leaves more space to expand and release their flavor into the water. The teapot has a built in filter that will automatically filter out the leaves as you pour, making tea preparation easy and simple. A lot of tea strainers really cram the leaves together, and therefore less of the flavor can be extracted. If you do end up using a tea strainer, make sure that you go for a bigger one, so you can extract more flavor. If you don't have a tea strainer, you can brew the tea in a French press, and push the plunger down when the brewing time is up, to stop or slow the extraction. You'll still want to pour this out quickly, so the tea doesn't overbrew. If you don't have any tools at home, you could brew the tea leaves in one cup, to give them space to unfurl, and then transfer them into another cup using a fork to catch the leaves. This is the most complicated way to do it, but it requires no specialized tools. So now that we have our teaware, let's get back to the brewing temperature. The ideal brewing temperature varies from tea to tea, and the important thing here is that we're not extracting too much bitterness from the leaves. The bitter flavors in tea come from the catechins and polyphenols, which are most prevalent in green teas. Green teas are heated after the harvest, in order to lock in these fresh, vegetal flavor profiles. This is why they're able to maintain their green color, hence the name green teas. Black teas, on the other hand, are oxidized. During the oxidation process, the polyphenols are converted into theophyllabins and theorubicans, and the tea completely changes in color and flavor. So green tea has more polyphenols, and black tea has less polyphenols. So does this mean that green tea is more bitter than black tea? Not if you prepare it the right way. Luckily, the bitter components of the tea, like the polyphenols and the catechins, are only extracted at higher temperatures. So if you prepare a Japanese green tea like Sencha with 160°F or 70°C water or lower, you will end up with a sweet and savory flavor profile with no bitterness. Green teas are the most sensitive to temperature, so they require the coolest water, while black teas, dark oolong teas, and poorer teas can stand up to higher temperatures. As a general rule, the greener the leaf, the more sensitive it is to temperature. You shouldn't brew green tea over 175°F or 80°C, but black teas, oolong teas, white teas, and poorer teas can be brewed between 185 and 212°F or 85 to 100°C. You don't want to brew the tea too cold or you won't extract enough flavor from the leaves. Once you know what type of loose leaf tea you have, you can look up the best brewing temperature and you're ready to go. If you really want to get serious about tea, we recommend that you get a temperature-controlled kettle so that you can set the water to the perfect temperature every time. If you don't have this, you can take the boiling water and transfer it into a series of mugs. Each mug will cool the water down by approximately 10°C or 18°F. For Japanese green tea, which is the most sensitive to temperature, you'll need to cool it down 3 to 4 times to get the right temperature. This is a trick we learned at a tea house in Tokyo as we were traveling around Japan in search of the best green tea. You'll only have to do this trick in the beginning, as eventually you'll be able to tell the rough temperature of the water in the kettle just by looking at the bubbles and the steam coming off of it. When it comes to brewing time, the standard recommendation is to brew the tea for 2 to 3 minutes, but this is too long for most types of teas. For Japanese green teas, 1 minute is plenty of time to extract a rich flavor from the tea. For a tea like Gyokoro, which is more tightly rolled, you will need a longer brewing time of 2 minutes so the leaves have enough time to expand and fully release their flavor into the water. This tea produces a unique, sweet and savory flavor that is unlike anything else in the world of tea and the best ones we've found are produced by Mr. Sakamoto in Shibushi. If you want to try them, you can find them on our website. But these relatively shorter brewing times are fine as long as you have a higher leaf-to-water ratio and you brew the tea multiple times. Rather than throwing the tea leaves away after using them, you can re-infuse the leaves at least 2 to 3 more times. Each brewing will have a slightly different flavor, so not only do you get to experience different flavor profiles, it's also more economical because you get more cups of tea from the same leaves. For Japanese green teas, you can use 20 seconds for each additional infusion and the same temperature water. The tea leaves are already opened up, so they don't take too much time to release their flavor. If you're using the Gong Fu brewing method for Chinese teas, you will use even shorter infusions, which can be as short as 5 seconds. This may seem wasteful, but you can brew the tea up to 20 times with each infusion producing a slightly different flavor. Now that you know how to brew loose leaf tea without tea ware and with a teapot, now comes the fun part, experimenting with different flavors. If you want to try a bunch of different teas and see which one you like most, you can try one of our tea samplers at Neoteas.com. After traveling around Japan for the past few years, we've met with dozens of tea farmers and sampled hundreds of different types of teas. Each one varies slightly based on the region, production style, and the picking and processing. We've ultimately selected just a small handful of our favorites and you can find them all on our website, Neoteas.com. If you already know what you want, you can get a full pack of popular teas like Gyokoro, Sencha, Hojicha, and more. If you really want to take your tea experience to the next level, we also offer an assortment of handmade clay teapots, which are the perfect tools for preparing loose leaf tea. Thank you all so much for watching. We'll see you next time.