Estimating tea weight-gongfu
This is my first time posting, and I’m relatively new here, so first of all hello! I’m just starting to experiment with gong fu style brewing, and therefore I need to closely follow the brewing instructions that come with the tea (experimenting with teavivre dragonwell). It suggests 5g of tea. I have a kitchen scale but it can’t detect such light weight. Somewhere online I heard a heaping tea spoon was around 2-3 grams. I was wondering if anyone could confirm this or suggest a better way to estimate weight. Thanks!
Hi Chris, welcome!
It’s tough to estimate weight with a teaspoon, a larger leaf will have less tea per teaspoon than a smaller leaf. A dragonwell will have less grams per teaspoon than something like sencha. Look for a kitchen gram scale, there are many on amazon available under $20. Also, it is important to take into consideration the size of your brewing vessel. 5g of tea in a 100ml vessel will be much different than a 12oz mug. Are you looking to brew gongfu style or western style?
Scale is my friend.
http://www.yunnansourcing.us/store/index.php?id_product=809&controller=product
Guess there is no reliable way around a scale. Thank you both, I’ll hopefully order it soon.
Any number of US sellers sell scales if you want to order from the US. Additionally, you can get them on EBay from China or sites like Yunnan Sourcing. There was a vendor I remember from someone else posts that sold only scales and was US but I cannot remember the name.
This is the scale I use. It’s cheap, $8 to $9 http://www.amazon.com/American-Weigh-AWS-1KG-BLK-Signature-Digital/dp/B002SC3LLS/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1456187298&sr=8-5&keywords=0.1+scale
People can link various articles that xgrams tea = xteaspoons but it is always wrong. Even tea changes weight over time so it is really hard to estimate, and some teas are just impossible to stuff into a teaspoon.
haha yeah, oolong for one. Whenever I see vendors with whole leaf oolong and teaspoons i’m thinking ‘did they ever even try that with this?’ Da Wu Ye or something. All the leaves fall off
You can start by measuring, but as you get practice and you begin to adjust to your taste, you can eyeball it.
It’s not only about the exact weight. Exact water volume, temperature and infusion time matter. But at the end you should do what you like the most.
Just used a scale for the first time, it really was a game changer. Best cup I’ve ever made
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