Tea Steeping Calculator

Western brewing works on roughly 3 g of leaf per 250 ml of water — about a level teaspoon for a mug, though a teaspoon of feathery white tea weighs half what a teaspoon of tightly rolled oolong does. That is exactly why this calculator answers in grams. Once you have weighed a few spoonfuls on a kitchen scale you will know your own tea by eye, and you will be far closer than the packet instructions ever get you.

Scaling is linear: double the water, double the leaf. A 500 ml teapot of black tea takes 6 g and still steeps for four minutes, not eight. The most common brewing mistake is scaling time instead of leaf — a big pot brewed for twice as long is not stronger tea, it is bitter tea, because astringent tannins keep extracting long after the sweet and aromatic compounds have finished.

The strength setting moves the leaf, not the clock. Light drops the ratio by a fifth for a softer cup or for tea you plan to drink several of; strong raises it by a quarter, which is what you want if you take milk, brew over ice, or make a concentrate. Cold brew is the extreme case of the same idea: the same leaf, cold water, and eight hours in the fridge.

Under the result you will find the gong fu equivalent — the same tea at roughly four times the ratio in a fraction of the water, steeped for seconds instead of minutes, and repeated many times over. It is a different way to drink the same leaf, and for oolong and pu-erh it is usually the better one. Every number here comes from the curated schedules in the Teafinity library, so the calculator agrees with the individual tea pages on this site.