Gongfu cha question
I have always brewed my tea the “western” way but I am convinced that brewing gongfu style is best. I have my first gaiwan (!) on the way and I was wondering, approximately how many grams of tea do you use per session? How many steepings per session?
Generally 1g per 15ml is a good starting point. How big is the Gaiwan, did the vendor give the ml capacity?
Steepings per session depend on the tea. Green can be 3-4, whilst pu-erh can be 10+ (some even say up to 20, but my max is usually 10ish)
All this depends on personal preference and to what extent you want to separate out the steeping flavours.
As far as puerh goes, in a 100ml pot I use around 7g raw tea and about 8g ripe tea or a little higher. As far as oolong goes I try to stay around 6g or 7g for a 100ml pot. I rarely gongfu steep black or green teas. For a heavily charcoal roasted oolong tea I will often go with closer to 5g for 100ml as this weakens the charcoal note a bit. In the end you need to experiment and find what you like. What I have suggested are only loose guidelines and you may find you prefer more or less leaves. I do think it is good to start with short brew times. After giving the tea a short rinse steep I start with steepings of five seconds and then adjust from there.
I basically do two 5 second steeps then 7 seconds then 10 seconds then fifteen seconds adding another five seconds each time till I get to about 30 seconds, then I start adding more time. Look at any of my puerh reviews and you will see my progression.
Best to read up a bit on gongfu brewing first. This is as good a place to start as any:
http://www.thechineseteashop.com/gong-fu-cha.html
If video based information is also desirable China Life / Mei Leaf produces a series on brewing, tea basics, individual types, and so on. They’ve been flagged here related to vendor claims issues (related to everyone’s favorite subject, about tea tree ages). There is always room for criticism of tea sources, or even tea theme education content, but it seems worth a look for covering some basics, since you can see it instead of read text:
https://www.youtube.com/user/chinalifeteabar/about
There’s a guy that used to do video tea reviews that would be a different kind of source reference, Jason Walker. I won’t say anything about him being tied up in conflict, but the tea industry does seem to embrace that sort of thing on one level, and again this isn’t an endorsement of his reviews, just another reference that seemed well informed to me:
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