Brewing

Everything above this point is context. This is the strand about the cup in front of you: how to make it, how to taste it, and how to keep the leaves worth making.

Brewing is where tea stops being a subject and becomes a practice, and the practices genuinely disagree. Gongfu cha uses a small vessel, a great deal of leaf and infusions measured in seconds; the English method uses a large pot, little leaf and several minutes; both are right about their own tea and wrong about the other's. Water, temperature, vessel material, leaf-to-water ratio and time are the five variables, and almost every tradition is a different settled answer to them.

Filed here: the methods themselves, the vessels, the water, the vocabulary tasters use, and the storage and ageing that decide what a leaf will still be capable of in ten years.