Never over-steep again.

A timer that knows the tea, not just the minutes

Most kitchen timers ask you for a number. That is the part nobody actually knows: sencha wants around 70 °C and a minute, English Breakfast wants water off a rolling boil and three, a ripe pu-erh wants a rinse and then forty seconds. Getting it wrong is not a small penalty — over-steeped green tea is bitter in a way no amount of sugar rescues, and a five-minute steep can waste an expensive gram of Da Hong Pao.

Teafinity starts from the leaf instead. Choose a tea and the timer arrives pre-loaded with that tea's temperature in °C and °F, its leaf-to-water ratio per 250 ml, its steeping time to the second, and its caffeine in milligrams. The same numbers are published on this site, tea by tea, so you can check them before you install anything.

Every infusion, not just the first

Good oolong, white tea and pu-erh are not one-steep teas. A rolled Tie Guan Yin barely opens on the first infusion and often peaks on the third or fourth; a pu-erh cake will still be giving flavour on the twelfth. Timing that properly by hand means remembering both where you are in the ladder and how many seconds to add — which is exactly the kind of bookkeeping a phone should be doing.

The app carries the full infusion ladder for every tea that has one: the rinse you discard, then each numbered infusion with its own duration, growing by a few seconds each time. Tap through them and the timer advances by itself. Tea by tea, that is 5 to 12 separate durations rather than a single number — the difference between a stopwatch and a brewing schedule.

It rings even when the phone is in your pocket

A timer you have to stare at is not a timer. Teafinity alerts in the background, so you can put the phone down, answer the door, and still catch the sencha at sixty seconds rather than ninety. On iPhone the countdown stays visible without unlocking the phone.

Everything runs on-device. Once the app is installed, the brewing data lives on your phone: no signal in a hotel kitchen, no network on a train, no problem. That also means the timer starts instantly rather than waiting on a request.

Hitting the right temperature without a thermometer

Most kettles are a single button, while most tea data assumes you can produce 80 °C on demand. You can get close without buying anything. Water off a rolling boil is 100 °C; left standing in an open mug it sheds roughly 10 °C in the first minute and then cools more slowly, so five to seven minutes of waiting lands you near 80 °C — the median green tea temperature in this library. Pouring once between two cups drops another 5 to 8 °C in a single move.

Publishing both °C and °F on every tea makes that guesswork checkable, whichever kettle you own. It also shows you where precision actually matters: a 70 °C gyokuro is unforgiving, while the herbal blends want water straight off the boil and will not punish you for a rough estimate.

What it costs, in plain words

The timer is free. Thirty curated teas come with their complete brewing data — Western timing, temperature, ratio, caffeine — plus favourites, your collection and daily tea insights, with no trial clock running.

Premium unlocks the rest: the full 176-tea library plus 80 seasonal blends, Gong Fu multi-infusion timers, unlimited photo identification and the ability to request teas we have not added yet. It is a 3-day free trial, then $29.99 a year or $3.99 a week, billed by Apple or Google and cancellable in two taps from your device's subscription settings.